Mary M. Suominen (1928—)  [Flickr page]

Trudi was unhappy with her husband. This had happened before, in Germany, with a young draftsman from Dresden who got her pregnant and reluctantly married her three months after their son was born. They were barely out of their teens and, as the boy’s father would put it in a sorrowful letter a decade later, too young to be grown ups. Trudi moved on in less than a year, leaving the baby with her parents.

She got a divorce and married a merchant who had ambitions of living in America. They made the crossing to Ellis Island on the Stuttgart, a new steamship that held a thousand passengers, four years after their wedding. Trudi’s little boy stayed behind with his grandparents, ignored by his father and unwanted by this other man in his mother’s life. He has his own story, about deserting the German army during WWII and being executed by a firing squad.

Now, two years later, Trudi was unhappy with this husband, too. She said he became demanding and abusive and sometimes hit her, and refused to even discuss her request for a divorce. When he finally filed for one some time later, he complained that she “willfully, continually and obstinately deserted” him. Whatever her reasons, that much was certainly true. On their sixth wedding anniversary, she packed up her things and left. She had found another man, again.

This one was a violinist who played in the concerts Trudi had been going to with her cousin Elsie, who had moved to New York from Germany a year earlier. The ladies had been enjoying some evenings out on the town, much to the annoyance of Trudi’s husband. They went anyway. Elsie’s husband played in the concerts alongside the violinist, and it was he who did the introductions.

What was it like, on the eve of the Great Depression in the winter of 1927, for the young German woman with a wandering eye and a son left on the other side of the Atlantic to meet this handsome dark-haired musician with Swiss immigrant parents, very prim and Catholic, and a studio for violin lessons? We cannot know, because they are both now gone and all we have are a few recollections Trudi left behind in the memory of the child she conceived with the violinist a few weeks before she packed those things and left to start a life with him.

With her mother Gertrude (Trudi), 1950  [Flickr page]

When the midwife came to Trudi and Bill’s apartment to help give birth to my mother in 1928, Bill the violinist had also become Bill the driver, because his violin students were dropping out. The timing is a bit fuzzy here; my mother was told she was conceived in the backseat of my grandfather’s taxicab. Was he already driving a cab when Trudi met him, or did that happen in the months to come? It makes for a good story, anyhow.

Mom also heard some good stories about a famous performer I will not name whom Bill chauffered around the city. This was another driving gig, better than just being a cabbie: Drop off the performer while he entertained one or another of the women who pawed at him in hordes, and discreetly pick him up later. There was a lot of the sort of thing going on that resulted in my mother, it seems.

Her childhood was quieter than all this. She spent most of it living with her parents—Trudi had finally found a man for the long haul, till death would they part—at her uncle’s house. Despite the stock market crash of 1929, Bill reopened his music studio and got active in the old orchestra. He also qualified for the New York Philharmonic, which led to the highlight of his career, a solo violin performance at Carnegie Hall. I grew up hearing him play that violin in his room at our house, an old man full of memories. He was my mother’s best friend.

With her dog, 80 years ago  [Flickr page]

As a young lady  [Flickr page]

 

Another story, about that: My mother was sixteen years old when she took a bus to the subway for a date rollerskating with a sailor she’d met once. She was terrified when she got on the subway, alone, and surprised that her parents hadn’t objected. Then panic, as she skated around the rink realizing that the sailor was never going to show up and thinking about the long ride she’d have to make, late at night, to get back home. Then a hand on her shoulder; it was her father. “No wonder they didn’t try to talk me out of it,” she said. Her father was keeping an eye on things. Her mother, too. “I looked at the side seats and saw my mother sitting there watching. Dad was a good skater. We did all the dances. After we left the rink, Dad stopped at a place where we had ice cream Sundaes.”

When Trudi lay dying of cancer just eight years later, she said to my mother, “People will still eat ice cream cones.” I think about that, and the grandmother I never had a chance to meet, when I eat one myself.

Wedding Day, 1946  [Flickr page]

My mother was not quite seventeen when she moved, grudgingly, with her parents to a little bungalow on a leaf-canopied dirt road in upstate New York. I remember it well from early visits to my grandfather: a screened-in front porch and one all-purpose room behind it, one bedroom, and a toilet in the basement, flushed with a bucket of water. Bill and Trudi slept in twin beds in the attic. It wasn’t much of a place for a teenage girl from the city. But a long arc of her life, and mine, would trace from a farmhouse down at the end of that rutted old road.

Trudi went to the farmhouse to buy a cooked chicken, and there she once again found herself eyeing a handsome, dark-haired young man. She wasn’t interested in wandering from her marriage to Bill—it was a happy one that had been in progress, officially now, for a dozen years. What she said when the young man’s mother introduced him as her son Ed, just back from the war, was this: “Now that is for my Mary.”

Mary and Ed were married eight months later, in the spring of 1946. She wouldn’t turn eighteen until summer. They would have four children; I was born last, decades later.

Art and Ambition

Exhibiting her art at a photo show  [Flickr page]

My grandfather didn’t just play the violin and drive a cab and rescue Mom from being stood up on dates. He was also a camera bug, taking photos with his Kodak Brownie and developing the black-and-white images in a darkroom at home. His daughter spent a lot of time in that darkroom, with him and on her own, too. Bill had to lock up his photographic paper because she went through it too fast. It was made with silver, and not cheap.

With one of her many photo awards in the 60s  [Flickr page]

In her twenties, she published an article with some photos about being a young wife living in a trailer. Her portraits were getting noticed, and someone asked her to be a “following photographer” at a wedding. This was still a fairly new concept: Instead of the participants just sitting down for poses in a studio, the photographer would go to where the action was: the bride’s home, the church, the reception.

The gear for this undertaking, she recalls, “consisted of a heavy bulky press camera equipped with a large metal flashgun, film holders that each held two 4x5 black and white sheets of film, and No. 2 flashbulbs the size of regular lamp bulbs.” She lugged all that stuff into the man’s world of 1950s photography, returning with a few carefully framed exposures to develop herself in the darkroom.

It was exhausting she said, but fun. “Once my camera was in my hands, there wasn’t time to think beyond creating a love story through my lens.” The photo processing was time-consuming and added more responsibility. But she found it gratifying to see “the finished wedding album. It was a beautiful product of such personal nature to present to a happy client. So when another request came, I went ahead again.” And again, and again, building a business that she would run, with my father joining her as a partner, for the next fifteen years.

Giving a talk in the 70s  [Flickr page]

Mom is a visual artist who made a career out of her gift for framing images in her mind and then expertly exposing them onto limited frames of film. But running Lakeside Studio called for a lot more than that.

She was an event fixer who took care of essential little details during all those weddings and receptions. That started with the very first wedding, when she calmed a crying mother of the bride and used some rubber bands to shorten a ringbearer’s shirtsleeves, fitting them under his jacket. Mom usually helped the brides with their wedding gowns. They were comfortable in such intimate settings with this woman as their photographer.

And she was a skilled technician who equipped herself with the best equipment available, who knew how to operate and care for it. When a smaller camera came on the market with a 2.25 inch format that would work with the exciting new color film, she bought two of them. There was always an extra of everything for backup; Mom didn’t like having dreams about catastrophic equipment failures on Friday nights. This was capital investment for a serious professional operation: The Hasselblad 500c single-lens reflex was the best you could get.

I remember the thunk and whine of that big shutter marking each careful shot in the studio as Mom leaned over the viewfinder and Dad stood off to the side, watching the people whose heads and arms and smiles he had just helped assemble into a perfect pose. He brought his own expertise to the partnership; one of his strengths was posing the subjects while keeping them happy to be there sitting on stools under the bright lights. “Did you know it takes more muscles to frown than to smile?” I heard him say a hundred times, and still don’t know if it’s true. But smile they did.

With one of her Hasselblads  [Flickr page]

How many kids get to watch their parents work together as respected and mutually respecting partners, making a good living right there in the house? I’ll never forget the acrid smell of hot studio lights, the forest of shadows they cast on the walls, the thickness of their big black cords snaked along the carpet. The crisp rustling of wedding gowns as Dad sweet-talked their wearers into sitting up just a bit straighter, with their heads turned just so. The sound of Mom laughing with mothers of the brides.

They would wind up photographing almost 3,000 of those brides. One Saturday during their glory days, with each of them taking photos separately and some freelancers helping out as well, their tally was seven weddings. They would wave to each other from churches on opposite sides of the street. The local newspaper’s bridal section was pretty much given over to the work of Lakeside Studio.

Before any of that could happen, though, a young woman in the 1950s needed to believe in herself as an artist and entrepreneur, to assert that she was not just another pretty housewife tidying up the kitchen until her husband got home. When she went to City Hall, the clerk grinned at her and asked, “You want a photographer’s license?” She paid the fee and took the paperwork from him, and he said, “I give you six months.” She did see him again, while photographing his own family members’ weddings.

When she and Dad finally sold Lakeside Studio and moved to Arizona, her second act was to manage a portrait studio. There she photographed Ronald Reagan, Dolly Parton, countless high school seniors, food, and a Rembrandt she found unimpressive. Sometimes I would ride my bike to the studio to see her after school, and then, when I could drive and wanted to use the car, to give her a ride home. She had samples of her work hanging on the studio walls, and my favorite—for some reason—was a blown-up shot of Dolly in a glimmering white outfit that must have been spray-painted on for her concert.

Story and Spirit

With Dad, sometime in the 1980s  [Flickr page]

Mom viewed the wedding album as a story that became a work of visual art. Her aim was to capture “all the beauty and love of the moment” for the bride and groom, especially the bride. She loved a good story, and she knew how to tell them in words as well.

An example of that is her 1999 book Twice to Freedom about Dad’s experience as a prisoner of war in WWII. (He met and fell in love with the daughter of a German immigrant less than six months after escaping from German captivity. These parents of mine were an interesting pair.) Dad would occasionally get to telling his war stories and we would sit quietly and listen, not wanting to interrupt what was a rare and fickle thing.

Mom was always fascinated by the history of the war and wanted to record Dad’s part in it, but he never shared anything about it with her except these verbal stories. When she found some notes he was writing, she typed them out and put them back. He continued writing, and she continued typing, adding a narrative of her own with photos and historical references. They never talked about the book until boxes of its first printing had piled up in the house (it sold out) and he finally read one. He sent her a signed card in the mail: “Wonderful. Fantastic.”

In the 50s  [Flickr page]

Dad could be trying at times. I think Trudi would have put him in his place and kept him there. There was plenty of love between him and Mom and me, though. As a privileged late arrival to the family, I was fortunate to have a wonderful and supportive father who drove me across town to buy electronic parts and radio equipment and stood on the house roof helping me string up antenna wire. He was in his late forties when I was born, and I told him he needed to last a while. He did, for another 35 years.

There was something else about my father that arrived late into the family, an unseen entity that followed slowly behind from that farmhouse where Trudi first spotted him. It was at turns a force of joy and beauty and fear and pain, forming me and shaping me, giving me the view I would hold of the world for the first forty years of my life. It was the Apostolic Lutheranism of Dad’s Finnish parents, a demanding and fervent faith they brought across the Atlantic and practiced with a few thousand others having their own origins in the land of Lars Levi Laestadius. A handful of them lived in Ulster Park and they held services in homes. There was sin and forgiveness in abundance, and much wailing about people’s transitions from one to the other.

After twenty years of marriage to a moderate Catholic, Dad returned to the exclusivist Protestant religion of his youth. Contention sparked into flame about things like their teenage daughter’s earrings and the television in the living room. With no change on her part, Mom was one of the worldly now. She entered a period of soul-searching, questioning the clergy at various churches where she did her weddings, spreading their pamphlets out on her bed. Finally she asked God to point the way, and the answer she thought she heard had her convert, enthusiastically, to Dad’s Laestadianism. The television went away.

It’s not my place to summarize my mother’s current beliefs, half a lifetime later. Frankly, I don’t know or care what they are. What I do know is that she made quite a splash in the little pond of American Laestadianism (Heideman branch), just as she did with photography in upstate New York.

There were front-page articles in the Greetings of Peace with this eloquent former Catholic woman (what an exotic combination!) writing about the sense of peace and joy she felt at finding God’s Children. There were long letters back and forth with prominent ministers during a time of schism in the early 1970s. And there was a song—a beautiful one I sang many times along with hundreds of others in church, before a committee somewhere changed the tune and lyrics and ruined it all—about her heart longing for Christian love. She wrote it in the car on the way back from services one evening, full of feeling: “God’s children here blessed from above / Here in the flock on God’s Holy Mount / I find peace when washed in the fount.” And just listen to the biblical poetry here:

She’s written a lot of private musings that express this same faith in God, even as some people in the old church scratch their heads and wonder about whatever happened to Mary, who married an unbelieverafter Ed died and is now living with another one. Like this stanza from a poem “Our Senior Years”:

In another poem, “Life,” she writes about standing “on the threshold of eternity,” turning around to lift her eyes to “the light from Heaven above.” Her words tell of faith and praise and a patient hope. This is from “I Want to Walk the Narrow Way”:

She isn’t all just sentimentality and flowers, though. I smile at the memory of a story she liked to tell about a gathering of their little congregation of Apostolic Lutherans. One of the elders was admonishing her to humble herself and repent of some sin, or more likely, a false spirit that was being blamed as the “root” of many sins. At the time, false spirits were running rampant across Laestadian Christianity—Heideman branch, non-Torola—and the discerning elders of the Ulster Park congregation had spotted their share. This gentleman was enamored with the sound of his own voice (I heard it plenty myself), and his rebukes were going on and on. Finally, Mom said, “If you’ll shut up, maybe I’ll repent.”

Repentance, perhaps, but humbling herself? She might not have been so good at that part.

Love and Loss

With Joe, a late-in-life love story  [Flickr page]

Mom and Dad made it 57 years together. She couldn’t stand to be alone after Dad’s death, and Match.com had itself a new customer. She came across the listing for a man whose wife had died three days before Dad. Off they went—talking on the phone, meeting at a restaurant for lunch. “It was so comfortable with Joe,” she writes. “We held hands and shed tears for our lost spouses. This led to many more ‘dates’ and we knew it was right for both of us. We couldn’t stay apart.”

She married Joe in 2005. I was still so firmly stuck in my old church’s judgmental views that I didn’t attend their wedding, because she was in the Laestadian faith and he wasn’t. One should not be unequally yoked with unbelievers and all that. I wish I hadn’t been so damn righteous. Unlike me, some of her family and friends who remained in the church behaved decently about it: They were there, and they have my admiration for it.

I met Joe after the wedding on a visit down to Arizona. We went out to a buffet for dinner, and when Mom got up for some dessert, he looked at me with his big bushy eyebrows raised. “Well?” he asked. Did I approve, finally? I stuck out my hand. “Joe,” I said, “I give you my mother’s hand in marriage.”

They were a couple of doting old lovebirds, Joe and Mom. “It’s our new beginning,” she wrote in another poem, “when these vows are said. Wedding bells are ringing, but it’s my heart instead.” They had a wonderful marriage, both of them respecting the memory of their first spouses and loving each other just the same. And then she found him dead one day, the way of all flesh, and she grieved over another husband outlived.

Their five years together was much too short.

With Jack, still smiling for the camera  [Flickr page]

Now Mom is with another companion, Jack, a smart and interesting man. Her memory is fading and his sharp mind helps keep things on track. They sit in his trailer with their two dogs and watch their remaining days go by. She is coasting to the quiet finish of a long life well lived.

I sat beside her a couple of months ago as she leafed through an album I’d made for her of my own favorite photos. The call of the camera seems to have continued a bit in me, just as a hobby. She commented on composition and lighting, pointing to this and that, saying how pleased she was that I’d taken up photography. I looked at this remarkable woman, at her wispy hair and that big nose she left me with, and my eyes welled up with proud and fond and grieving tears.

You’re amazing, Mom, and I love you.

It was quite an honor to have my first fictional work read on Seth Andrews’s The Thinking Atheistpodcast today, one of the most popular on the Internet. Seth directs his show toward those who “assume nothing, question everything, and start thinking,” to borrow the show’s tagline. He runs it in “a polished format, a relaxed environment and a rage-free challenge to the religious beliefs that defined his youth.”

Read it here

I have listened to the show for years now, beginning when I was first realizing that there were issues with my own childhood religious beliefs. Podcasts are a great way for wavering souls to get new perspectives and some reassurance on their lonely journey of doubt, all in the privacy of a pair of earbuds. There are a lot of great shows about secularism nowadays, and Seth’s is one of the best.

Seth read the first of my story’s three parts to cap off today’s show. Hearing one’s writing rendered in the smooth, measured voice of a talented radio professional is certainly a treat. He thought it was well done, “a nice way to add some depth to stories of bloodlust and torture and execution and all the stuff that the Bible speaks about so bluntly, like bullet points.” It was a way, a “semi-fictional” one, “to go in and get into the minds and hearts of those who killed so many with the edge of the sword.”

And they did it in God’s name, as the passage he read from 2 Kings 10:30 says about Jehu: “The LORD said to Jehu, ‘Because you have done well in executing what is right in My eyes, and have done to the house of Ahab according to all that was in My heart, your sons of the fourth generation shall sit on the throne of Israel.’”

If you are a Christian for whom the Bible is the Word of God, the highest authority in your life, this is a problem. Your God ordered and praised the very kinds of outrages being committed by the barbaric psychopaths of ISIS not a hundred miles from where this story is set. Jehu cut off his share of heads, too, piling them in heaps outside the gate of Jezreel.

Give it a look. I really enjoyed the week of research and writing it took to produce. In the months ahead, I’m guessing that there will be more entries under the “Fiction” heading over in that sidebar.

I’m also considering a whole book of Bible stories written like this. “Jehu’s Jihad” would be one of a dozen or so chapters providing dramatic narrative for the scriptural stuff that gets passed over in sermons and Sunday school. Perhaps the next one should be “Have Another Drink, Daddy” about Lot and his two daughters. Fifty Shades of Grey sold pretty well, after all.

The world beyond the gate. Can you make that first step and keep going?  [Flickr page]

I spent the first forty-odd years of my life in a fundamentalist Christian sect that considers itself “God’s Kingdom,” the exclusive repository of grace on this earth after 2,000 years of Christianity. Leaving it was one of the best and hardest things I’ve ever done.

Conservative Laestadianism attracts few converts and retains fewer still of those, with the notable exception of some vibrant missionary activity in Africa. In Finland—where most of its 100,000 or so adherents reside—and in North America, almost all new members arrive at the maternity ward. There are plenty of them, since birth control is frowned upon.

The church safeguards the souls of its new arrivals by instilling into their small brains its doctrines and all the nuances of a uniquely closed and controlling subculture. Its own survival is at stake. These are the innocent little lumps of fresh clay that this religion, like so many others, molds and shapes into the soft living stones of its shaky spiritual house.¹

A substantial portion of them last through early adulthood, until young marriages can start producing their own fresh batches of new members. The cycle continues anew, as it must. These blocks of flesh and blood wear out, sometimes even slip away, and must be replaced if the structure is to stand.

Until recently, it was very rare for anyone beyond their twenties to walk away from this “living faith.” The few cases I’d heard about were older singles who despaired of having their nets come up empty in a stagnant little pond of church-approved prospects, and a few spouses who had been faced with or created problems in their marriages. Then a friend of mine left the church, staying happily married and with kids, for reasons that focused on the church itself. That sort of thing just did not happen once you reached a certain age.

Then it happened to me, too, and my wife. And now it has been happening to quite a number of people, both in Finland and North America. Even more than the open defections, there seems to be a lot of private grumbling, questions no longer so easily tamped down. Pressure slowly and silently builds inside the minds of troubled believers—sermon after sermon, baby after baby—and the familiar preaching of forgiveness for “sins and doubts” no longer seems to provide much relief.

But the believing brain can withstand a lot of pressure. Those who make it through all those years of indoctrination and cozy familiarity—of family, friends, and social setting—have strong containers in their heads to keep it all bottled up. Sundays pass, more children are born and taught sound doctrine, and for every person who manages to leave, there are probably a dozen who want to but do not.

Pine Droplets and Webbing  [Flickr page]

A Finnish correspondent who did manage to leave describes a web of stuff that he had to cut through before he could finally set himself free. The first strand of it is social dependence.

“My whole life I have been ‘rooted into God’s Kingdom,’” he says. That made him “almost completely dependent on this religious community.” He was taught that most of his “friends should be ‘other believers,’ meaning other Laestadians,” and spent his childhood being brought to services, church camps, Sunday schools, Bible classes, and church youth activities. Molding and shaping the clay.

There was plenty of time for it. He was kept from the “‘worldly’ leisure activities that non-Laestadian kids attend.” No team sports at school, no dances, no TV or movies.

Next is moral dependence. There was little emphasis on any individual conscience. Rather, he was taught about a “community conscience: An individual may be erring but ‘God’s congregation’ cannot.” From childhood, he had been told

that ministers and Laestadian publications are God’s Word. When they say that God is Almighty, and that he doesn’t want us to use birth control, that he tortures the disobedient people infinitely, then I have no other option but to believe. I have also been warned that I can’t make decisions based on my own opinions and thoughts, because I should ask the congregation for advice.

He was also made spiritually dependent on Laestadianism. His “own will and conscience” was “crushed and replaced with a gospel”—a formulaic preaching of absolution central to Laestadian doctrine and practice—“that only this community can provide.” Laestadians preach “the gospel” often, regular believers in private conversation and ministers from the pulpit: Your sins are all forgiven in Jesus’ name and blood.² My correspondent was

taught by these minister-gods that I get my sins forgiven by the absolution gospel. If I don’t go to Laestadian services, I won’t hear this sermon and the gospel, and therefore I remain a prisoner in sin. And if I remain a prisoner in sin and die in such condition, I will be condemned to eternal perdition and torture.

Light at the End of the Tunnel  [Flickr page]

“Wouldn’t a smart individual, living in modern Finland, be able to question these doctrines?” he asks. “Of course, but everything is not always as simple or easy as it may seem.” Indeed not. My own process of questioning and eventually rejecting that same inherited faith compelled me to do a year of full-time research and writing, spending “thousands of hours researching seemingly every aspect of Conservative Laestadian history, doctrine, and practice, plus Christianity in general, plus the Bible and the very nature of God,” as I put it in the resulting 700-page book, An Examination of the Pearl. It was “a labor driven by love, but also by the mental anguish of being unable to avoid questioning a doctrinal system that demands firm confession of belief, on pain of eternal damnation.”

Leaving the faith I had inherited and cherished for 40 years was not an easy thing for me to do. Nor was it for my Finnish correspondent. He “had been made dependent on the community in every possible way.” And when he “started to question a small portion of this doctrine,” he “was immediately faced with the alarm mechanisms in the community.” Structural damage, one of the building blocks is slipping out of place!

He got rebuked and heard about people’s worries that he was on the wrong path. “The community that now pressured me threatened to take away all the good that the community was giving me, if I continued to question these matters” (my emphasis). Because of this threat, he says, “most Laestadians don’t let these questions arise even in their own minds: They stifle these thought processes immediately, and ask for their sins and doubts forgiven like they have been taught to do at services.”

Now he happily reports that he’s been able to build a social life outside the church. The old “Laestadian-based network was getting thinner,” anyhow, because of his questioning things. And he’s noticed that he just doesn’t “need the spiritual nourishment in this community” anymore: “I was able to break free from this dependence and obey my own conscience.”

The church social network doesn’t readily extend far outside its narrow confines, and that’s certainly true among Conservative Laestadians in North America, too. One man who left the LLC (Laestadian Lutheran Church) has managed to stay somewhat attached, though only after dealing with a huge outcry from church friends and family. It was, he says, “one of the most painful experiences I ever went through.” But the “constant badgering only reinforced the thought that I made the right decision.”

After a few months of heated arguments and accusations about not loving family, of hearing about people’s prayers “for me to have restless days and sleepless nights so I would see the condition of my heart,” it finally started to get better. “People must have finally realized that I no longer wanted to remain inside the LLC box.”

The same thing happened to a correspondent from another branch of Laestadianism, the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church. She got “calls, texts, voicemails, old-fashioned letters, and even emails.” (The Internet is mostly a no-no in the OALC.) “A majority of what I received was genuine concern—for my soul, my life, my eternity.” There was some coercion and manipulation there, too, she says, but believes that was done out of concern. “Though it hurt me then, I understood where they were coming from, and still feel the same today. They know only what they know. I think Maya Angelou said, ‘We did then what we knew then, we do now what we know now,’ or something along those lines. That is all that they know, and I pity them for it.” ³

There are a lot of religious groups filled with people who “do only what they know” and make life difficult for their friends and family who have learned a bit more. I’d like to give some perspective and encouragement to people facing a difficult path out of their inherited religions—Laestadian and otherwise—by discussing two extreme examples.

The Exclusive Brethren

The first of these is a Protestant Christian sect that holds what Wikipediacalls “an uncompromising ‘separatist’ doctrine.” David Tchappat’s fascinating book Breakout (official excerpt available here) describes the difficult departure he made from their midst. This fascinating half-hour audio interviewwith the author is highly recommended, especially for troubled Laestadians; you will hear a lot of things that sound weirdly familiar.

Social dependence was certainly a factor for Tchappat. Being “born into the Exclusive Brethren,” he says, “ensured that your small following of fellow churchgoers was your society whether you liked it or not. Having a social circle outside of this was not an option.” ⁴

Journalist Michael Bachelard estimates the number of worldwide members at 43,000, Australia being home to about a third of them.⁵Tchappat provides the same estimate, adding, “Almost all growth comes from births, as conversions into the faith are practically unheard of.” ⁶ It is indeed a “small following,” as Tchappat puts it, at least when compared to most Christian denominations. But that’s a matter of perspective; the closed church society in which I grew up has about half as many members in my country as Tchappat had in his.

The Australian TV program A Current Affair recently aired a scathing documentary, twelve minutes of which you can watch online, about what it bluntly calls a “secret cult.” Bachelard describes the Brethren as having erected “a wall between themselves and the outside world.” Since 1960, he says, there has been a rule against “eating, drinking, or socializing with any outsider.” What that means, he says, is “there are no friendships, no social intercourse whatsoever with outsiders, and sect members are encouraged to behave with an air of being impervious to the outside world and aloof from it.” ⁷

A fascinating book

Tchappat refers to his life in the group as a “fishbowl existence.” He fantasized numerous times about leaving it before finally doing so. But that was a daunting prospect: “I knew no one in the outside world and had no idea how to look after myself. Since birth, every decision had been made for me. My life was regulated by rules and laws set in place by the Man of God, which were in turn implemented and policed by the local priests.” ⁸

Some of the prohibitions he lists are the same as those from my own upbringing: marrying outsiders, physical contact before marriage, contraception, TV, hair coloring, make-up, gambling, and attending “anything that could be deemed as fun or entertainment.” As I did in my childhood Laestadianism, it seems Tchappat felt an urge to confess any infractions of all those rules: “After church when the rest of my family had gone to bed, and my dad was tidying the kitchen, I approached him and told him I had to speak with him. He shut the kitchen door and I immediately broke down, pulling out my list of sins and confessing them to him.” ⁹ And this part sounds uncomfortably familiar, too: “We were told that we were the chosen people and should feel privileged to be born into this group.” ¹⁰

“It was only the courageous and inquisitive minority that ever dared to leave the Assembly of God,” says Tchappat. That is also true in the Kingdom of God, my old group’s informal self-designation, though the number of defectors is growing surprisingly fast. In my own case, the fear was more of eternal rather than earthly consequences. After many dark and bloody centuries under the Church, secular governments are finally forcing Christianity to leave its exit doors unlocked. But most of them still have the awful eternal threat written in fiery letters overhead. Abandon all hope, they read, in a twist from the words inscribed on Dante’s gates of Hell, you who leave from here.¹¹

According to Tchappat’s account, the Brethren are no exception. More than a year after leaving, he “would wake up in the dead of night dripping with sweat and would dream of the burning pits of hell.” Going back, he thought, “was the only way to avoid eternal punishment.” ¹² Though “the Brethren do not officially believe that they are the only Godly people,” in modern times, anyhow, Bachelard says they do “believe that those who leave the sect will not be saved.” ¹³

While still in the group, Tchappat had worried about being excommunicated for having sex with his girlfriend. Those in that position fared no better in the eternity department. They were, he says, “described as being worse than people of the world because they had known the light and turned their back on it. It was considered an eternal damnation to die out of fellowship and only the grace of God and forgiveness of the Brethren would redeem such people from the pits of hell.” ¹⁴ Here is his harrowing description of “massive guilt attacks” he suffered several years after walking away from the group:

I would lie in bed on my days off staring at the ceiling and crying to myself. I was falling apart. I had my [friends] but I could not confide in them about my inner personal turmoil. All my teachings from childhood were coming back to me. I was petrified that I was going to the gates of hell if I did not fall down and repent. I began to read my Bible constantly and could not sleep for fear of dying and entering eternal damnation. I was seriously entertaining the thought of returning to the Brethren. I did not know how I was going to cope with such a life change but I did not care. It was a way of escaping my problems.¹⁵

That is some heavy shit. Eternity has a way of messing with people’s heads. But he also describes dire consequences right here on earth, in this brief life, for those who “enter the world” from the Brethren:

If caught planning an escape, the local priests would place them under house arrest along with their families and have them put under assembly discipline, revoking any rights to attend church or socialise with those in the inner circle of the Brethren. Those over sixteen years of age who made it to the outside world without detection, would be ex-communicated and starved of all monetary assistance and family support, forcing them to return or find alternative methods of survival.¹⁶

Bachelard’s book is full of tragic stories about family breakups occurring because one spouse was excommunicated from or voluntarily left the group, about parents devoid of contact with their children. Tchappat’s own story is much the same—a final letter he sent was “the last form of contact I would ever have again with my family.” His gripping and sad narrative has an upbeat ending of sorts, though: “There has never been a time in my life where I have experienced such inner peace, happiness and satisfaction as the present day.” ¹⁷

Islam

One way. You’d better believe it.  [Flickr page]

Leaving the fold is also serious business for the nearly one fourth of the world’s population who are professing Muslims. In addition to social coercion and the prospect of their own version of Hell, there is often a serious threat of physical harm.

Just look at this comment threadon a web forum calling itself “the online Muslim community” to see how real that danger is. Some guy with over 2,000 comments posted at that site states that death is preferable over continued life to people who claim to be of Islam, leave it, and then call others away from it. Presumably, the actual preferences of the apostates themselves are of little consequence. “It’s a mercy,” he says, “for if they continued, their place in hell would be lower, and lower, and lower. We judge law by the belief of an afterlife 100% without a shadow of a doubt. Thus, death is not a ‘bad’ thing if it is done to prevent chaos.”

Another commentator (4,000 posts) clarifies, “The death penalty for apostates is for those apostates that leave Islam then work against Islam in some way.” It’s the same as treason, after all, and the “penalty for traitors throughout history has been death.” Still another commentator (not quite 500 posts) adds, “The apostate should not be put to death until he has been asked to repent three times,” generously allowing him three days to think things over first.

What a disgusting little attempt to defend medieval intolerance and barbarity. And there it is, polished with a veneer of twisted logic, showing up on an Internet discussion forum built by the technology of a more enlightened age. Seeing that sort of thing helps us outsiders appreciate why an American ex-Muslim highly regarded on reddit was moved to post a “Public Service Announcement” warning about coming out. If you are considering telling “your friends and family that you are not a Muslim anymore,” he says, you should only do it if:

• You are 18+ years of age
• You are old enough to live on your own
• You are financially independent from your family
• You know where to go if you get kicked out
• You do not live in a religiously conservative country like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc.

If even one of these conditions is not met, he adds with sober emphasis,

do not tell anyone you are not a muslim anymore. Seriously. I understand how hard it is to live a lie and to put up with bullshit, but in the end, you are going to have a bad time. This can’t be stressed enough. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read self-posts by young, financially dependent ex-Muslims in Muslim countries that want to do this or have done this and felt deeply worried for them. It’s not a rational decision to make, and it’s not gonna do anyone any good if you end up hurt or even killed over it. Don’t put yourself in danger like that. Believe me, it’s not worth it at all. Please be considerate of your safety and well-being, and don’t be a hero unless you’re fully capable of facing the consequences.

Those consequences are very real for one high school student in Saudi Arabia. I hope he’s been careful about keeping his identity and IP address well concealed when posting to public discussion forums online. Out of an abundance of caution, I will just paraphrase his comment without a link. He hates living in the closet, he says, but coming out to his parents mean that he’ll be shipped off to Mecca to study Islam for the rest of his life or get beheaded. And his parents will grieve about his apostasy. Only if he can become financially independent and move to a country that respects religious freedom will he even consider it.

Reading this stuff does have a way of putting things into perspective. Your family has sent you emails and texts expressing sadness for your soul and offering some self-righteous prayers? You’ve lost most of your oldest and dearest friends? You miss having a place to go see familiar faces every week? Yes, that sucks. But at least you don’t need to worry about being sent to a religious re-education camp or having your head chopped off. Count your blessings.

Heina Dadabhoy

Islamic states are not good places to be when you don’t enthusiastically share the state religion. (Or when you are in the female half of the population, or when you have been accused of a crime, or when you would just like to have a little enjoyment in life, but that’s another blog posting.) These anonymous comments from fearful closeted nonbelievers often express a longing, sometimes even hope, to live in secular countries.

As an American citizen, Heina Dadabhoy had that good fortune, at least, when she told her family she was leaving Islam. They thought she was “turning [her] back on them,” she said in an interview with the New York Times, her parents accusing “her of thinking that she was better than her grandparents and other ancestors.” They “reacted the way they knew how, which was to freak out.” Public defections from the faith are still very rare, and her parents “had never heard of anybody leaving Islam. We were raised with the idea you can’t leave, that nobody can leave. Leaving Islam was something somebody incredibly deranged would do.” ¹⁸

At a conference a few years ago, I asked Dadabhoy if the fear of Hell is also a factor for those considering leaving Islam. It definitely is, she said. Indeed, you can see the eternal fate of the ex-Muslim spelled out in the Quran itself:

Whoso desireth any other religion than Islam, that religion shall never be accepted from him, and in the next world he shall be among the lost. How shall God guide a people who, after they had believed and bore witness that the Apostle was true, and after that clear proofs of his mission had reached them, disbelieved? … Their recompense, that the curse of God, and of angels, and of all men, is on them! Under it shall they abide forever; their torment shall not be assuaged! ¹⁹

Moving On

There are countless other examples of the difficulties people experience trying to get out of the religions that were foisted on them at birth. The ones I’ve read in books and on Internet discussion forums are so numerous and compelling that this blog posting would turn into a book of my own if I were to venture too deeply into any of them.

Indeed, even thinking about that makes me recall a whole genre of books about Leaving the Fold. That, for example, is the exact title of both Edward Babinski’s fine collection of stories about people deconverting and Dr. Marlene Winell’s thoughtful guide to doing so.

People are leaving these high-control religious organizations—slowly and at great cost, and often left thinking they are the only ones going through such a difficult process. Many more stay behind, wishing they too were in the right circumstance to leave, biding their time until they can. Here is a brief listing of a few groups I’ve read about, with quotes from former members who have walked away and told their stories. I recommend every one of their gripping, illuminating books.

• Scientology: “All of a sudden, I felt as if a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. These were things I didn’t have to worry about … a radical thought formed in my head. Because I am not a Scientologist. It felt good to think it, to say it, to scream it. I am not a Scientologist. … If something is wrong, I can say so, honestly and openly, without fear.” —Jefferson Hawkins, Counterfeit Dreams (2012).

• Non-Denominational Christianity: “When you’re five and contemplating Hell, concepts like ‘proportionality’ exist far out of reach, well beyond climbing range, unknowable. No young child can digest or discern whether such overt sadism is an appropriate punishment for the heinous act of simply being born as a descendent of Adam.” —Seth Andrews, Deconverted (2012).

• Fundamentalist Baptist Christianity: “I had developed some kind of gag reflex for my brain. I just couldn’t think clearly or objectively about my childhood or my surroundings. I felt like if I acknowledged things done to me in my childhood that were negative, I would be guilty of breaking a great commandment. I would be dishonoring my parents or somehow loving them less. Love entailed a lot of denial.” —Timothy Michael Short, Preacher Boy (2011).

• The People’s Temple (Jim Jones, thankfully defunct): “When our own thoughts are forbidden, when our questions are not allowed and our doubts are punished, when contacts and friendships outside of the organization are censored, we are being abused for an end that never justifies its means. When our heart aches knowing we have made friendships and secret attachments that will be forever forbidden if we leave, we are in danger. When we consider staying in a group because we cannot bear the loss, disappointment, and sorrow our leaving will cause for ourselves and those we have come to love, we are in a cult.” —Deborah Layton, Seductive Poison (2010).

• Evangelical Christianity: “Imagine what it would cost you to give up your faith tomorrow morning; if it is unbearable even to think of it, then you ought to consider how much the cost of leaving your faith is influencing your ability to judge your faith critically and objectively.” —Kenneth W. Daniels, Why I Believed (2010).

• The Churches of Christ: “I was deprived of showing spiritual compassion to others because I was taught that if they were not in the CoC they were not ‘real’ Christians, and the CoC didn’t seem to have a lot of concern about people who weren’t real Christians in their eyes. I was deprived of the fellowship of my classmates on their religious turf.” —Charles Simpson, Inside the Churches of Christ (2009).

• Mormonism: “I had been taught early on that the only reliable evidence about the Church—in fact the only evidence at all worth looking at—comes from the Church itself. This evidence can be undeniably confirmed, not through logical, deductive reasoning, but by the emotional feelings we were taught from early childhood to recognize as being from the Holy Ghost.” —Jack B. Worthy, The Mormon Cult (2008).

• The Jehovah’s witnesses: “[T]he only way out of this dilemma was to acknowledge my feelings and doubts about the organization that I had suppressed for so long, and what it meant that I was having them. But doing so was extremely frightening to me, because trying to face up to my doubts nine years ago only resulted in panic attacks and anguish, which ultimately drove me back into the organization. This time, though, I knew I would have to see it through, as my body would not cooperate with the charade any longer.” —Diane Wilson. Awakening of a Jehovah’s Witness (2002).

There is a lot to learn and think about for people who are considering the exhilarating but terrifying possibility of leaving their childhood faith. Are you one of those people? If so, let me offer you my respect and encouragement, whatever you ultimately decide. Even without taking another step, you have allowed yourself the delicious freedom of thinking for yourself, in the privacy of your own brain.

Take your time. The church is right to say that this is the most important matter of your life, even if its own web of dependencies—social, moral, spiritual—is what made things that way. Don’t beat up on yourself for acknowledging how strong that web is. Cut through each strand at your own pace, however slow that is, or not at all.

And in the process, if there is still a God in your heart that is the object of your private devotion, give him a little more credit than your hellfire preachers ever will. Would you ever torture anyone, for five minutes, even for some terrible crime? You’re better than that, aren’t you?

How about a child who wandered into your office where she didn’t belong and messed up your papers, and, after being scolded, angrily told you she didn’t love you anymore? Would you throw her little body into a pit of flames and watch the smoke of her torment swirl and rise as you listen to her scream? ²⁰ For five minutes?

“What kind of a monster do you think I am?” you say. The thought upsets you, and it should. Think about how slanderous it is against anything remotely resembling a loving God. Or an omnipotent one: A God that could stop such horrors but stands aside, unmoved and doing nothing, is no better than whatever diabolical force you might imagine feeding the fire.

How about five hours? Five days? Let her scream and burn for five long days. Disgusting, isn’t it? How about forever? Unrelenting agony, pain without end, utterly pointless suffering with no hope of relief. And for what? For not knowing better, just like everybody outside the particular group you are thinking about leaving? There is simply no way that anyone—person or God—with the slightest shred of decency could do such a thing.

Whatever else you do, take that awful and impossible idea off of your shoulders and quietly put it down. It is not worthy of another moment’s belief.

Incandescent Forest  [Flickr page]

Step up from your computer, put down your smartphone. Look at your innocent child, look outside. See the blue sky and the green trees and all the good things that you have joyously attributed to your God. Leaving a controlling religious group does not make all of that disappear. There is still wonder, there is beauty, there is joy. And there is a whole lot less guilt and fear.

Notes

Finally got a print of this to the homeowner  [Flickr page]

My first stop on this evening’s brief walk was to a house I’ve gone past many times since taking a picture of it last winter. It’s a beautiful old place. Christmas lights lining the edges of its front porch windows put a nice sharp border on them. A sodium-vapor street lamp suffused the fresh snow with an amber glow. Blue-gray clouds hung low in the night sky behind it all, lit up by stadium lights at the school nearby.

I’d been wanting to give whoever lives there a print of that picture, and tonight I did. The homeowner was quite happy to get it, thanking me several times and saying how nice it looked. I thought so too, I said, and we wished each other a good night. Then I continued my walk, toward another house in the neighborhood.

This was the home of a good Samaritan who had found something of ours with enough identification on it to give us a call. I rang the doorbell and a woman about my age answered, holding a baby. He was a cute little guy, at that perfect age where they are light and round and eager to smile about nothing. After identifying myself, I surprised the woman and me both by asking if I could hold him for a minute.

“It’s been a while since I’ve held one this small,” I said. She thought about it for a second and then handed him over. I stood there for a while, bouncing a stranger’s baby in my arms, looking in at the warmth of her home and hearing the racket of little voices in the background. I said, “Would you like to guess how many I have?”

There were other young faces appearing now, along with her husband who had called me about my missing stuff. Somebody guessed, “Seven?”

“Nope,” I said. “Go higher.” I handed the baby back.

The woman was surprised and pleased at this development. She had thirteen, she said, and it was nice to meet somebody who had a big family, too. Finally, after a couple more guesses, edging upward and then overshooting the mark, my own statistic was revealed: eleven kids.

We talked for a while, the bunch of us standing at their threshold with the pleasant air of an Indian summer evening leaving everybody indifferent about the door hanging open. There was a blur of little bodies whizzing back and forth pushing toy trucks on the wood floor. Smiling faces everywhere. It’s a beautiful family, I told them, and meant it. We compared notes, touching on highlights of experiences that the other would understand.

I told them about when I’d seen a red-headed guy with his line of red-headed offspring following behind in the aisle of a Wal-Mart. A bunch of stuff was stacked on pallets in between us, so he didn’t notice me and my own crew of little followers as he made his way toward the auto parts and sporting goods. I looked over and said, in that loud rude voice I’d heard many times myself, “Look at all those kids! And they’re all so young!” He turned to glare at me, and then saw me smiling with all my kids standing right there, and he laughed.

These neighbors of mine did, too, and then they shared a story of their own, as Jesus looked at us all from a painting hanging on the wall behind them. I gave them my phone number—again, as they hadn’t kept it once they got hold of me—along with my address down the street, and invited them to call.

I think they just might. Who knows; perhaps we will get together sometime and enact one of those chaotic Sunday afternoon scenes that were so familiar in my life. Two big piles of kids merge at the front door in a cloud of chaos and then pairs of them go off to play or swap stories in the barracks downstairs. Meanwhile, the four parents try to sit and talk.

Our home doesn’t have any crosses or religious pictures on the walls. No Bibles sit on our shelves anymore, stuffed with Sunday School homework papers that will remain untouched until the drive to church next week. I hope that absence wouldn’t trouble them, any more than their Jesus portrait bothered me. Whether they believe like I did for many years or like I do now, people are valued here just the same.

Welcome, neighbor.

Slave Shackles  [Flickr page]

On a Sunday evening in October 2014, a kind and decent man sat at the pulpit of a Minnesota Laestadian church before a bunch of kind and decent people and asked for God to open His word during their services. The grace of Jesus Christ is a gift that gives perspective to all things in life, he noted in his mild midwestern voice during two minutes of prayerful conversation with the Heavenly Father.

Then it was time to read from God’s Word. The sermon text was the entirety of a “very beautiful letter” of the New Testament, the Epistle to Philemon. This letter was supposed to have accompanied an escaped slave, Onesimus, back to his Christian master Philemon. It requested that Philemon treat the runaway as he would treat Paul himself, charging any wrongdoing to Paul’s account instead of the slave’s.

This text came to mind, the preacher said, because it fit in with the theme for that Sunday: the commandment of love. A haze of peaceful familiarity settled over the proceedings as the preacher’s words about love and grace rang out in the room. And then he started talking about slavery:

But it so happened that this Onesimus departed—left, fled—his post as a slave or as a servant. Of course, we have our own history in our country with slavery that goes back to the time of the Civil War. None of us knew that time, but it was a reality in our country, and has been a reality in many, many areas of the world through the world’s history.¹

A reality, yes, and a horrible one. Where was this headed?

In many “worldly” churches—the ones whose pastors fifty years ago had stood arm in arm with protesters against fire hoses and snarling dogs, asking for equality and dignity—the listeners would sit contentedly, knowing they were starting on an uplifting trajectory. In some of those sanctuaries, their ride would be smooth and steady, the brotherhood of all men quietly affirmed by the time they all walked with polite little smiles toward the exits and their separate lives. In other places with words like “Full Gospel” and “Holiness” on the signs outside, the listeners would brace themselves in roller-coaster pews, knowing that they were all ratcheting slowly upward toward a climax of indignation and then wave after wave of praise and pleas for justice and eventual deliverance from this vale of tears.

But those things do not happen in Laestadian services. What happened was the preacher saying slavery indeed had been a reality “and it was acceptable in the time.”

Acceptable to whom? Not to the slaves, one would imagine, or to that Jesus character who said you should do unto others as you would have done unto you.² But it was certainly acceptable to those who claimed ownership of other human beings. And to the Roman ruling elite whose grudging favor was being courted by the guys writing Gospels and Epistles of this new Christian religion, slavery was an indispensable part of the system.³ Proper moral stories had to be told, a delicate political line had to be walked, or all bets were off for this emerging competitor to the Roman gods.

None of that was discussed in the sermon, nor could it be even if the preacher privately appreciated such nuances. The text was set firm and black and durable on the gilt-edged page that lay open before him, bound tight with all the rest of its pages written by a hundred nameless men but really, We Believe, by God Himself. Human factors, historical factors, simply do not apply to these particular words.

And so the preacher, a fine man who grew up in an ethnically diverse neighborhood and had recently spoken eloquently about respecting other cultures and people who are different, kept his mouth open while his religion made crazy words come out about slavery:

And, as contrary as it is to our human mind, we see that believing people also had slaves, like this Philemon. And the instruction to God’s Children is: Whatever calling you have been called into, that we would fulfill that calling. God’s word did not give slaves of that time permission to flee their masters. They were possessions, human possessions of people, and so by fleeing you were transgressing the law and the will of your master.

These issues “are too big for us to understand in our time,” he added, perhaps wincing at the ugliness of what he had just left dangling in the air. Better shroud the awful sight from view, add a little of what Daniel Dennett calls the pious fog of modest incomprehension. “But so it was,” the preacher said, and then went on to talk about “something great that had happened in the life of Onesimus,” his conversion to the religion of his slave master.

Poor Onesimus, not yet a Believer, might have had a pang of “conscience over the fact that he fled his master.” We can imagine, the preacher said, “that Paul would have told him that it’s not acceptable that you do this, that you flee from your master.”

The sin, you see, was not on the part of the man who presumed to own another person as a slave, who forced a fellow human being into servitude and treated him as property. Rather, the one who needed repenting was the slave escaping captivity. By fleeing his master, “he did wrong to Philemon.” ⁴ But, happily, Onesimus repented and became one of God’s Children. The sermon then turned to weightier matters, eventually touching on the recent Ministers’ and Wives camp where concerns about contraception, school sports, and certain types of jewelry had been discussed.

Is there any rational voice loud enough to be heard in a place where such a sermon is taken seriously? Is there a message clear enough to penetrate such profound isolation from the very basics of human decency? I browse through my catalog of words, deliberate over my tidy and efficient combinations of words, and my sentences are as frail little twigs poking against a concrete dam.

The people who sat and listened politely to this sermon are educated and intelligent. They work and function and raise children in a civilized society of the year 2014. They have smartphones in their pockets and purses. They bid on contracts and buy cereal when it is on sale and consult with teachers about how their children are doing in school.

But what a thick wall of devotion encloses their otherwise functional minds when the preachers start talking! It is an environment designed to suffocate all independent thought, and does so with marvelous effectiveness. It so completely blocks anything said from “the world”—no matter how clearly written or loudly shouted—that people with tender consciences remain sitting in their pews while a man tells them about the need for submission to the ownership of human beings as property.

I give the preacher credit, at least, for not sugarcoating or avoiding the reality of his chosen text. Perhaps a few of his listeners might consider, if nothing else, what some other parts of the Bible have to say about slavery.

Exodus 21 provides God’s Children (you know, those “Old Covenant believers”) with detailed instructions on slave ownership. They could force one of their own people into slavery, so long as freedom was made available after six years. But if one of those Believing masters had supplied his Hebrew slave with a wife during that time, neither the wife nor any children they had together could leave with him. They were the master’s property, the result of his divinely approved slave breeding program.

Only if “the slave plainly says, ‘I love my master, my wife and my children; I will not go out as a free man’” could he remain with them, in permanent servitude that was marked by a hole punched in his ear.⁵ Thus the system twisted the bonds of ordinary family love into chains around its victims’ wrists. It reminds me of the way cult-like religions keep their troubled followers within the walls. Sure, you can leave, they say. Everyone is free to believe or not believe. But your family stays with the Master, and the relationship between you will never be the same again.

God’s unchanging, eternal Wordmakes some further provisions for when “a man sells his daughter as a female slave.” Yes, his daughter. She “is not to go free as the male slaves do” after the six years are up. Not unless the new master first explores his three additional options: to get a refund on the merchandise (“he shall let her be redeemed”), to pass her off to his son, or, if “he takes to himself another woman,” to keep feeding, clothing, and screwing the slave as well.⁶

Slaves could get beaten, but not to death. At least not immediately. “If a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod and he dies at his hand, he shall be punished. If, however, he survives a day or two, no vengeance shall be taken; for he is his property.” ⁷

Those who adopt such madness as the Word of God forfeit all credibility about matters of morality. When they shrug and accept the idea of people being consigned as chattel in the forced service of others—because an ancient Book says so—you can ignore their proclamations about right and wrong. When they tell you that it is human reasoning that makes you hesitate to join them in their conclusions, you may rightly suspect everything else you are hearing from them as nonsense.

And when they preach about a Heavenly Father who approved slavery but frowns on kids playing sports at school or desperate mothers slowing their endless floods of pregnancies or young women putting jewelry in their ears, you might consider what kind of company you are keeping.

Notes

Dark Skies at Dusk  [Flickr page]

It is a bleak and grey morning after the 2014 midterm elections, brought to you by the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission. Released from statutory limitations and any apparent sense of civic restraint, a handful of obscenely wealthy old men have bought themselves a Senate.¹

Welcome to the new American dystopia, a replay of medieval feudalism where the many are once again doomed to spend their lives impoverished and constrained in service to the few. At this early stage, the cheery bunting of democracy still remains draped on the castles that are under construction for the elites. The populace is working hard at the projects, readily carrying blocks up the scaffolding without an armed guard in sight.

No force is needed, yet. These poor folk were skillfully persuaded to work against their own interests, by a swarm of well-paid hucksters who stood shouting at the windows of their little cottages with lies and promises. Those have been effective with religions, too, for thousands of years.

Over the precipice  [Flickr page]

When the shocks of discontent arise from us modern-day serfs, when we inevitably get jaded to the propaganda on our telescreens, the state security apparatus will be well prepared to fend off whatever pitchforks we might want to rustle up. Even as I write this and you read it, a shadowy network of automated surveillance follows our activities.²

At present, few people can be bothered to care. One of the senators who fought most vocally against it has now lost his office. The state security network will prove to be a convenient amenity for the oligarchs who, with a few billion more in installment payments, finally complete their purchase of our government.

It is time for a good loud lamentation, following an old biblical tradition. This one was pointed out to me, in an entirely different context having nothing to do with politics, by my new acquaintance, the gracious Daniel N. Gulotta. I’ve taken the King James text of Jeremiah 20:7-9 and 13-18 and (presumptious of me, yes) edited it to be more engaging for modern readers.

I omitted the middle part of the lamentation because it deals with specific enemies and vengeance. Our problems, I think, are more with who and what we have evolved to be. “As society invented more abstract ways to represent food, land, and labor with money and credit logs,” says Deirdre Barret in her insightful book Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose (Norton, 2010),

one individual could amass personal property worth a hundred or thousand times that of another. There is also, obviously, a compelling instinct to provide for one’s offspring; this is practically synonymous with whose genes will survive. However, people previously provided for their offspring mostly until maturity, with occasional provisioning for them and for grandchildren if the family remained together. Now the powerful and rich can direct these instincts at supernormal family estates, trust funds that endure for generations, and, in the case of monarchies, permanent rulership for the family.

This “may even apply within a democracy,” adds Barrett. Yes, it may indeed, and that is what we are now seeing.

Twilight  [Flickr page]

Lights Above and Below  [Flickr page]

Old Jeremiah sure knew how to vent. At least for the moment, with the First Amendmentmostly intact (no thanks to President Obama’s harrassment of reporters like the courageous James Risen), we in the United States still can enjoy that remnant of our liberty.

Notes

Chains  [Flickr page]

In a public Facebook post, a member of my old church recently directed some comments at a former member whose wife died giving birth to her seventh child. He cited the biblical command “to go and multiply and fill the earth” and said his conscience would not let him agree to the use of birth control. That isn’t just his personal feeling, though: “The Holy Spirit speaks to and tells me what is acceptable,” he said, adding that the woman’s death, “was God’s will. We don’t always understand why.”

And then he lectured this man who had tragically lost a wife and mother of the many children they already had: “It is very selfish of you to blame God for this. If you want to see her in death you need to repent and believe the Gospel.”

The bereaved father pointed out that, though he remarried after a few years, his “children never got a real mom again.” Was that “God’s will somehow?” he asked. “We knew how to prevent this, but we did not dare to do anything. Lots of dreams never came true.” And a woman died.

His Laestadian critic responded, “My own wife would never put herself and her own dreams and wants before the word of God.”

It’s no wonder that the Laestadian Lutheran Church prefers its members not to engage in discussions of “faith matters” on social media sites. But there’s actually nothing contrary to Conservative Laestadian doctrine in what the man said. It really is that bad. Consider this statement from an LLC presentation to ministers and board members in 2010:

Despite God’s command or ordinance, birth control is widely practiced. People defend their disobedience with a variety of reasons including the psychological and physical burdens of raising children, economics, pursuit of an education or a career, concerns about overpopulation, etc. These arguments are rooted in unbelief and selfishness. Believing husbands and wives know these arguments well. The threefold enemy frequently tempts us with them. We wish, however, to cast aside these arguments as well “and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God,” and bring “into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” ¹

This seems like an opportune time to repost an essay I wrote two years ago about contraception and Conservative Laestadianism. It originally appearedon the Learning to Live Free blog, where thousands of people have seen it. Apparently it could stand to be read by a few more.

It’s an important discussion to keep having. For women in fundamentalist religions that demand unrestricted access to their wombs, the stakes could not be higher. Their beliefs force them to confront an even worse prospect than physical death, lost dreams, and health problems both mental and physical. What they fear most of all is the threat articulated by an article in the June 2001 issue of my old church’s Voice of Zion newletter: eternal death, when “the loss of a soul is irrecoverable, and no compensation can be made for it any longer.” Then the “‘Son of Man’ will appear with all of His angels to execute judgment. Christ will then reward every person according to his works.”

“There is no way to escape the righteous judgment of God,” the article warns. Nor is there a way of escape from this vicious threat of damnation that was put into the minds of desperate young parents in their childhood and reinforced ever since. When the hell of eternity is the cost of disobedience, regarding birth control or anything else decided by the “living congregation of God,” it can seem like no amount of self-sacrifice in this one short life on earth would ever be too high a price to pay.²

Laestadians who are sick of hearing such dreary and backward language from their church do have reason to hope for better things, however. Despite the official claims about “unity,” liberal voices are now being heard that express much more compassionate and sensible viewpoints. Here is what one of them recently said in response to an interviewer’s question about contraception:

I will refer to a press meeting from this year’s summer services, where Aino Kannianen gave a presentation. She spoke on this matter, particularly, how we accept [the number of] children just the way God gives them to us. But there are situations, where because of health reasons, or because of other difficult circumstances, this can be dangerous. Preserving and honoring life requires that one does consider these issues.

“So, you are not completely absolute anymore?” the interviewer asked.

“This is a matter the parents need to decide on,” was the reponse. “Nobody needs to give birth risking their lives because of it.”

This wasn’t some fringe heretic or borderline unbeliever muttering over the coffee table to a few trusted friends. It was Viljo Juntunen, the new chairman of the SRK board of directors, speaking during an interview with a radio program in Finland.³ The SRK is the Finnish counterpart to the LLC, a far bigger one that comprises most of the 100,000 or so Conservative Laestadians across the globe.

Before proceeding with this repost (slightly edited for readability with a few additional notes) let me answer a criticism I occasionally hear: Why do I keep writing about a religion I’ve rejected? Why keep bringing up problems with it? Because, when it comes to this particular church, few other people are in as good a position to do so.

I devoted a year of essentially full-time work to researching and writing a gigantic book about a faith that I’d spent forty years living and loving, because it proved itself false to me in many different ways. My own deep-seated fears about eternal damnation, pounded into my skull from childhood, forced me to confront the church by learning about it, in exasperating detail. Braver people leave it with much less difficulty.

Quite a few people have told me that my work has made a difference in their lives. I’m pretty certain that there are women who have taken their bodies and health into their own hands partly as a result of what they learned from this essay when it was originally posted two years ago. In a world of outrages inflicted by elites and tyrants whose power is far beyond the reach of our puny voices, it is rewarding to have a little place where one’s careful work is appreciated, where it really does have some impact.

And unlike that Laestadian critic who confidently pronounced judgement on a man who’d lost a wife to dogmatic beliefs, I am not content to say, as he did, “You can’t believe with your mind.” Yes, actually, you can. That’s all you have to believe anything with. And you’ve got every right to expect people to make sense when they tell you what you should be doing with your body.

Maternal Martyrdom

Like the Second Temple Judaism that preceded it, Christianity is a religion based on blood sacrifice. That may seem like a jarring summation of a faith that is, for the average believer, less about theology than the happy commotion of little children playing, the smell of hot dish warming in the church kitchen, and the joy of singing songs that are as beloved and familiar as the hundred other voices ringing out from the pews alongside you. But it’s the harsh reality behind all the love and comfort: Jesus’ “blood of the covenant” was “poured out for many” (Mark 14:24), just as Moses took the blood of young bulls “and sprinkled it on the people, and said, ‘Behold the blood of the covenant, which the LORD has made with you in accordance with all these words’” (Exodus 24:8).⁴

The Sacrifice of Isaac by Caravaggio (Wikimedia Commons)

The sacrificial victims were not just animals or the one who was called the Son of God. Judges 11 tells us of Jephthah vowing to God that he would make a human sacrifice in exchange for permission to do a bunch of other killing, and fulfilling the vow with his own daughter. God even commanded the Israelites to give him “the firstborn of your sons,” the same as they were to do with their oxen and sheep. “It shall be with its mother seven days; on the eighth day you shall give it to Me” (Exodus 22:29-30). Then there is the Old Testament’s most famous story of human sacrifice, where Abraham was about to slice open his 12-year old son until God stopped him.

Ever since the Epistle to the Hebrews, that incident has been showcased by Christian writers and preachers as a test of faith that Abraham passed. “By faith Abraham, when he was tried, offered up Isaac: and he that had received the promises offered up his only begotten son” (Heb. 11:17). On Father’s Day of 2012, the pastor of the Rockford, Minnesota LLC devoted his sermon to Abraham’s “leap of faith,” the fact that “he had to kind of shut down his thinking.” He couldn’t think about it, or “use his carnal reason,” because, the preacher admitted, “what God asked of him was inhuman, was—if we say, in a human language—it was wrong. It was something nobody should do.” ⁵

Well, what are you supposed to do when God (or the voices in your head) tell you to “take your son and offer him as burnt offering unto me”? Never mind your natural response that “This is inhuman. This is wrong.” ⁶ Just obey: “If you don’t understand, you believe.” ⁷

Mothers on the Altar

The same blind obedience is being expected of Conservative Laestadian women regarding contraception, even when their lives are at risk. They must put their bodies on the sacrificial altar, or risk the damnation of their souls instead. It is a picture that Hanna Pylväinen paints vividly in her book We Sinners, with the story of a Laestadian mother having her seventh child, an experience that torments her economically, emotionally, and physically.

The woman’s pregnancy is a dangerous one, and the latest in a long parade of C-section deliveries puts her on an operating table, studying the looming medical equipment: “bags of blood hanging like deflated lungs, collapsed balloons, and their readiness paralyzed her” (p. 145). She describes the sensations (“a pinching in her chest,” “the feeling of being made of many numbed parts”) and the despair (“she had run out of fantasies—out of husbands to imagine, homes to build, pianos–there was nothing, only life itself, only long and hard and always more of it, always more,” p. 145). Then an image comes

to her of her abdomen as prey, ants to jelly on the counter, jelly on the knife, and she thought about Abraham and Isaac, about Abraham tying Isaac to the table, and she wondered how long it took him, and did he tie Isaac carefully. She thought she would try to get up, but she couldn’t, she was bound, or her muscles were, and she said, or thought she said, I don’t want to die, as if to ask God Himself to hold the scalpel. [p. 146]

The cords binding mothers to the birthing bed and operating table were very real in the 1970s. It was a “lenient mind” that would put “pity for the mother before having love in the truth concerning family planning, especially then when humanly speaking, the birth could appear dangerous,” according to the August 1976 edition of the LLC’s Voice of Zion newspaper. In 1979, from the other side of the Atlantic, the SRK’s Päivämies matched the dogmatism: “Never in any form does the prevention of human life come into question for God’s children.” But, there is always the eternal consolation prize: “Even if it were to happen that a believing mother or child would die in childbirth, or during pregnancy, they would go to heaven.”

Nine Patch Self-Portrait by Linda Frost

It may be tempting to consider all that an artifact of a harsh and misguided period of Laestadian history, when wrong spirits ran rampant and caretaking meetings of wayward church members were a weekly spectacle. But the pastor of the Phoenix LLC dispels any such illusion in his 2012 Mother’s Day sermon. He tells the story of a “dear sister” who was faced with “a childbirth that was going to cause her to die.” She had been warned by her doctors “that if you have another child, the chances are very great that the mother will die.” ⁸ She and her husband decided—on their own! As if the expectations of a high-pressure religious environment played no part—“that they would trust in God’s goodness.” ⁹

“God’s will” turned out to have little to do with the mother’s health. She became pregnant and, “after the birth of that child, it became evident that there was nothing the doctors could do to save this mother’s life.” No, they had already done their job—by warning the mother that she was playing Russian roulette with her uterus.

With evident emotion, the pastor recounts the dying mother’s denial of any bitterness about the outcome, and how she said, “I would much rather go to heaven with a clean conscience.” I don’t know if she left any kids behind, but if so, any pangs of guilt about leaving them without a mother are never mentioned. And again we hear the praise of blind, uninformed faith: “How simply this husband and wife trusted in the goodness and the protection and the care of the Heavenly Father.” ¹⁰

Now, the “pillar and ground of truth,” which Conservative Laestadianism has the conceit to call itself, can’t quite bring itself to talk this way when it knows the public is listening. Then it mutters acknowledgments that the wisdom of man, in the form of medical professionals, might just have something to say on the topic. The 2012 statement by the former SRK Secretary-General Tuomas Hänninen in response to a question from the Finnish news site Kotimaa24 is an example of the doublespeak:

The use or rejection of contraception is not a matter of authorization for each individual case, but rather a question of faith. Life is full of choices, and a person who wants to preserve faith and a good conscience makes the choice from that basis. In extreme cases, and for health reasons, it is good to listen to the treating physician.¹¹

Another example is from a few years earlier, the No. 5 issue of the SRK’s Päivämies newspaper in 2009 (emphasis added):

Believing fathers and mothers have comprehended as an unrelinquishable value the scriptural teaching that God is the Lord of life and death. He has the power to give life and the power to take it away. For this reason in our Christianity, we have considered children as gifts from God; they bring blessing, joy, meaning, and richness to our lives. That’s why even the parents of large families have wanted to accept children, even though it has perhaps meant that they have had to give up certain things. The basis for Christian parents’ decisions has been obedience to God’s Word, faith upon God as the omnipotent Creator, and trust in His guidance and care…. The preservation of the life of both the mother and child is important. A doctor, who has great professional ethics, helps humanity and respects a patient’s wishes by preserving life and maintaining health. Surely parents do not relate belittlingly to their doctor’s assessment given from a medical perspective. In difficult situations, faith guides us to make decisions based on preserving life according to God’s Word.

Why?

If you are an exhausted, desperate mother faced with the possibility of yet another pregnancy, perhaps a life-threatening one at that, the stakes are unthinkably high. Don’t you have the right to understand just why you should subject yourself to that peril? Or should you just tune out everything but the men who sit at their pulpits and urge you, as the Rockford pastor did, to put blind trust in God, “trust his congregation. Let us trust this congregation more than ourselves.”

It is telling that he describes the reasonable speculations Abraham might have had after hearing the divine death sentence pronounced on his innocent son, to wonder “if God exists, if this is just nonsense, foolishness, the creation of my own mind. Maybe I should turn back, go back home, and try to forget the whole thing.” ¹²

But God was there, the preacher says, and showed Abraham what he was to do. And when God speaks, you’d better listen. As Luther put it, “we must simply maintain that when we hear God saying something, we are to believe it and not to debate about it but rather take our intellect captive in the obedience of Christ.” ¹³

Perhaps the most detailed attempt at a defense of Conservative Laestadianism’s anti-contraception position to ever see print is a documentthat Seppo Lohi presented at the SRK’s 2009 Summer Services. His argument is mostly grounded in tradition, with little biblical support.¹⁴

First, he cites the Genesis commands to “be fruitful and multiply,” which he considers to have established “new life” as “a fundamental task of marriage.” He makes a bizarre appeal to Mark 10:6-9, Jesus’ directive about the permanence of marriage. And he rounds things out with statements in Mark 10:14 and a few verses in Matthew 18 about receiving and becoming as children.

The Genesis commands are the strongest of some very weak arguments. Lohi gets some help from Luther there: “Therefore, the word of God, ‘Be fruitful, and multiply,’ is not a command, but more than a mere command, namely a Divine Act, not being in our power to hinder or neglect.” But Mark 10:6-9 (What God has joined together let not man put asunder) has absolutely nothing to do with contraception. Neither do Mark 10:14 (“Whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me”) or the verses in Matthew 18 (e.g., “Except ye turn, and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven”).

This is all explained in §4.7.6 of my book An Examination of the Pearl, under the subheading “Human Rights Concerns.” And, as discussed there, it is a tricky business to rely on the Bible to establish the sanctity of life.

Exodus 21:22 imposes a mere civil penalty for hurting a pregnant woman and causing her to miscarry. Leviticus 27 places monetary valuations on human life (less for women than men, naturally), and assigns no value at all to infants less than a month old. Hosea rants against Ephraim that he will “slay even the beloved fruit of their womb” (9:16). The people of Samaria had “rebelled against her God,” according to Hosea, so “they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up” (Hos. 13:16).

So, then, is there no biblical position against contraception worth talking about, other than that “be fruitful and multiply” business? In her book Quiverfull, Kathryn Joyce cites those Genesis passages, and also two others that fundamentalist Christians have relied on to oppose contraception: Psalm 127, with its talk about the fruit of the womb and arrows in a quiver, and “the biblical story of Onan, slain by God for spilling his seed on the ground.” ¹⁵ Let’s take a look at these three main points in turn.

Psalm 127:3-5 says, “Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.” It was very important for a man (certainly not a woman) in that patriarchal society to have heirs who could continue and extend his household with its livestock, landholdings, buildings, slaves, etc. Look at the story of Abraham and Sarah, and how important it was for him to have a legitimate heir. (Ishmael got pushed aside as soon as Isaac was miraculously born, as the story goes.)

Laestadian doctrine has long fancied that there is some vague cloud of unconceived children floating out there somewhere who are all God’s property. They wait to be conveyed into existence one after another by women who have no option but to bear them and fill some man’s quiver. Along those lines, the Phoenix pastor makes much of the way his sermon text (1 Sam. 1:27-28) says that Hannah (the biblical figure, not the novelist) “lent” her child to the Lord.

Anna presenting her son Samuel to the priest Eli, Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (Wikimedia Commons)

Well, of course she did; the child was Samuel, who was destined to become an important prophet. But you can’t make that a generalization of God’s views about children, not when he slaughters so many of them without hesitation—in Sodom (children weren’t even considered as part of the ten “righteous” whose presence would have spared the city, Gen. 18:32), in Egypt (the passover plague, Exod. 12:29-30), and in Midian (“kill every male among the little ones,” Num. 31:17, KJV). Remember, this was the God who inspired the Psalmist to write, “O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones” (Ps. 137:8-9, KJV).¹⁶

There is a subtle but important issue in calling the fruit of the womb “his” reward, as the KJV does. With such wording, it is understandable that one might view the fruit of the womb as something God can demand as his own. But other translations render the passage without that possessive pronoun, and with no such implication of ownership or control:

NASB:“Behold, children are a gift [or heritage] of the Lord, the fruit of the womb is a reward.”

Luther (my translation from German): “See, children are a gift [Gabe] of the Lord and the fruit of the womb is a present [Geschenk].”

Finnish (1776): “Katso, lapset ovat Herran lahja, ja kohdun hedelmä on anto.”

One could see the same possessive implication in the KJV when it calls the fruit of the womb a “reward.” The other translations call it a “gift” or “heritage,” putting the emphasis on the child as something from God. Wasn’t the next generation more a bounty given to mankind—when God looked favorably on them—than a tribute owed to him? In the ancient world where women were expendable, dominated, and possessed, the “fruit of the womb” was produce, in an all-too-literal sense.

This leads to the second point of Scriptural support: God’s command to be fruitful and multiply. He said it twice, first after the creation of Adam and Eve and then after Noah parked his ark on the mountainside. Well, actually it was never said. Not in either of those stories, anyhow, because the stories are not true.

Evolutionary science completely disproves the ancient Creation myths of Genesis. (Yes, myths, plural—there are two conflicting stories in Gen. 1 and Gen. 2-3.) At no point was there any first pair of humans standing around having to be told to make babies and populate the earth. Every early human, no matter how many thousands and millions of years back you go in prehistory, had parents who had reproduced without any divine sex education and were pretty much human themselves. Darwin had this figured out a long time ago: “In a series of forms graduating insensibly from some ape-like creature to man as he now exists, it would be impossible to fix on any definite point where the term ‘man’ ought to be used.” ¹⁷

And it is just not possible for the entire human race to have descended from a single father and mother. Genetic evidence now makes clear that there have never been fewer than about a thousand members of Homo sapiens throughout the more than 100,000 years of its existence, which began in Africa, not Mesopotamia.¹⁸

Noah’s flood supposedly concluded with kangaroos continent-hopping around the world to Australia, and with God making his second pronouncement about replenishing the earth. Those who believe this story, an obvious adaptation of the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, are in a dwindling minority even among Conservative Laestadians, certainly among those in Finland. One ordained SRK priest with whom I’ve corresponded expressed shock and disbelief that people in the LLC actually take the story seriously.

The LLC preacher who said to someone back in 2009, “Why is Ed worried about Noah’s Ark? None of us believe it, either,” was just being honest about the situation. (Though not so much when he took part in a meeting a year later, where I would be pressured to profess belief in, among other things, Noah’s Ark.) Rather than belabor this posting with the devastating critique that the story deserves, I refer interested readers to Jason Long’s 101 Reasons Why Noah’s Story Doesn’t Float.

Now, let’s suppose—against overwhelming evidence—that the Eden and the Noah stories are true. Do they actually have anything to do with Christian doctrine? No; despite centuries of earnest exposition by Christian preachers from the Gospel writers onward, they do not.

The Fall myth wasn’t even about original sin. The Bible mentions nothing about it until Paul finally comes along with his “one sinner, one redeemer” idea in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15. What happened here (as with the supposed messianic prophecies that never quite add up) is that Christian theologians went back and looked over the ancient Scriptures and invented ways to give historical credibility to their new story about Jesus.

Another example is God clothing Adam and Eve with animal skins in place of their fig leaf aprons. Saying that God did so as a precursor to Jesus’ sacrifice is just something Christian theology made up. One could just as easily say that God replaced the fig leaves because he knew that Jesus would someday curse a fig tree. He did, and it is just about as relevant—that is, not at all.

Even if you make the two gigantic leaps of accepting the stories as accurate and also relevant, there is still the issue of God’s commands in the Old Testament being overruled in the New. Through his claimed representatives or directly, God commanded all sorts of crazy and horrible things in the Old Testament. Almost all of it is forgotten and ignored by Christians today.

The usual excuse is that Jesus fulfilled the law and thus the Old Testament doesn’t apply. Of course, for some reason, one still must honor one’s father and mother, avoid “sitting in the seat of the scornful,” and not hunt or fish on Sunday. When there is a handy verse to be found in the Old Testament that supports somebody’s idea of right and wrong, they don’t hesitate to pluck it out and quote it.

“Be fruitful and multiply” fares no better than the command to avoid sitting on furniture used by menstruating women (Lev. 15:20), for a number of reasons. First, with seven billion people, the earth has been replenished beyond the Genesis writer’s wildest imaginings. The whole point of the command has been achieved, and then some. If covering the face of the planet with billions of people—many times more than have ever lived—is not “replenishing” it, then the term is meaningless.

Second, perhaps surprisingly, some New Testament writers viewed children very differently than as a welcome gift. Look at how Paul felt about marriage in the seventh chapter of 1 Corinthians. Not only did he view it as more favorable to be unmarried, but he even told men “that have wives be as though they had none” (1 Cor. 7:29-30). The time was short, and there was no point bringing children into this world that was about to end. The way to avoid that back then, of course, was celibacy.

The third point, the Onan story (Gen. 38:3-10), was all about fulfilling the Old Testament requirement to raise up an heir. Again, that was very important back then, and was a duty that Onan owed to his dead brother. God specifically ordered Onan to undertake the task, and he disobeyed the command. God killed him, as he threatened and killed many others for disobeying his commands.¹⁹

There’s nothing special about the life of a speculative not-yet-conceived child here. It’s all about submission. That is, I think, also largely the case in Laestadianism.

Enough Already

Despite what is claimed by Laestadian preachers who know almost nothing about biblical scholarship, the collection of essays we call “the Bible” is not a single book with a unified message. It is futile to dig through “the Bible” looking for what “it” has to say on such a modern subject as the health of women, who were expendable and pretty much treated as property, when different passages provide contradicting answers about such fundamental things as whether God wants everyone to be saved, the value of the Old Testament sacrifices, and salvation by faith or by works.

The contradictions we’ve seen here concerning the value of children are just a small example of the conflict lurking between those mostly unread pages whose gilt edges sparkle under the pulpit lights. The writers of Genesis couldn’t even agree on details of the Flood story. (Were there seven pairs of ritually clean animals, or one? Forty days of flooding, or 150? See An Examination of the Pearl, §4.3.2.) So some ancient editor merged the conflicting accounts together.

None of the Old Testament writers were remotely the same kinds of “believers” as the writers of the Gospels. And the Gospel disagreed with each other! Not just about trivialities, but such fundamental points of doctrine as whether Jesus was divine (John 14:9-11) or not (Mark 10:17-18) and whether he revealed esoteric meanings of his parables to the disciples in secret (Mark 4:11; Matt. 13:11; Luke 8:10) or always spoke openly, saying nothing in secrecy (John 18:20).

Of course, this will not stop the preachers from citing and creatively interpreting their hand-picked passages from “God’s Word,” claiming the authority of God as they do so. They are the Holy men who speak as moved by the Holy Ghost, they claim, ironically citing a passage (2 Peter 1:19-21) from the single most discredited book of the New Testament.²⁰

When any criticism is raised, they point to the Serpent’s question of Eve: “Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?” (Gen. 3:1). There is a sad irony here, too: They are citing a character in a mythic story—long since proven false—to keep you from entertaining the possibility that what they say might be false. And remember that, even in the story, the Serpent was actually the one who told the truth: Adam and Eve did not die upon touching the fruit (Gen. 3:4). Instead, as he said would happen, “the eyes of them both were opened” (3:7).

Laestadian women need to open their eyes as well, before any more of them bleed to death on the sacrificial altar of a faith that requires their fertility for its survival. At long last, some of them are choosing to be the survivors instead, finally claiming their lives, their minds, and their bodies as their own. It’s about time.

Notes

A friend in my old church sent me some of her sonnets recently. She has an M.A. in Theology (Old Testament), plus another one in English. A very bright woman with some eclectic interests.

With her permission, I selected one of them to reprint here. (Does one even say “print” on a blog?) I’ve interspersed some of my seasonal photography between the poem’s three rhyming quatrains and the final rhyming couplet.

The photos get progressively warmer in color, matching the increasingly hopeful mood of the lines. But there isn’t a perfect match. After taking in the text along with my Pacific Northwest images, you might go over it again a second time, ignoring them and focusing on the slightly different farm scene the poet visualized when writing in Minnesota.

Now, before reading the Wikipedia article about sonnets, I might have supposed a “quatrain” to be something involving the transmission and driveshafts of a four-wheel drive vehicle. But even in my ignorance, I can see a certain formalistic beauty to this. Or, better put, you can hear it, when you slow down and let that silent narrator read the lines inside your head.

Alexandra writes from a devoutly religious perspective. Can you see the subtle redemptive theme she paints into the background of her Autumn harvest picture? Nicely done, I thought.

Farm on a Frosty Morning [Flickr page]

Inland Northwest Fall Colors [Flickr page]

Golden Sky [Flickr page]

Protest sign in NYC: “Danger, Police in Area”

On July 25, 2014, the office of a white prosecutor in St. Louis County, Missouri charged a black policeman named Dawon Gore with felony assault, according to an online articleby a local CBS affiliate, for “striking a MetroLink passenger on the hand with his expandable baton following an argument.” The officer was “jailed on a $3,500, cash-only bond.”

On Tuesday, November 24, 2014, the same white prosecutor, Robert McColloch, announced a decision by a 75% white grand jury not to indict a white policeman for shooting to death a young black man named Michael Brown.

Unlike Officer Gore, Officer Wilson never set foot in jail after inflicting violence on a citizen. He sat at home on paid administrative leave, enjoying a financial perk his black colleague went without. And now, while Michael Brown lies in his grave with bullet wounds riddling his lifeless body, Darren Wilson remains a free man.

Mother of Michael Brown, Lesley McSpadden. [Flickr page]

McCulloch described his “sworn duty and that of the grand jury,” in lofty terms during Tuesday’s 20 minute announcement, as millions of black Americans (and not a few white ones, including me) shook their heads in disgust with the realization that Darren Wilson would not be sitting at a defendant’s table in Missouri criminal court. Their duty was, the white prosecutor said, “to seek justice and not simply obtain an indictment or conviction.”

Obtaining indictments against police who shoot civilians doesn’t seem to be his strong suit.¹ According to a detailed and even-handed articleby Heather Cole back in September, his “office has brought to grand juries at least five cases over six deaths at the hands of police,” and they all turned out the way Wilson’s case did: No true bill, game over.

Ms. Cole took a detailed look at McCulloch’s prosecution history and made some interesting findings. The following three bullet points are quoted directly from her article two months ago:

• “McCulloch’s office has prosecuted at least 33 police officers or former police officers, according to a list provided by McCulloch’s executive assistant, Edward Magee. McCulloch has been prosecutor since 1991.”

• “McCulloch’s office also has at least four times presented information to a grand jury about police officers who shot suspects to death while on the job, according to a search of St. Louis Post-Dispatch archives. None of those grand juries indicted the officers.”

• “After a grand jury and a federal investigation exonerated a federal agent and a police officer in the fatal 2000 shooting of two black men during an attempted drug arrest, McCulloch called the shooting victims ‘bums.’” ²

“There is no question that Darren Wilson caused the death of Michael Brown by shooting him,” McCulloch said in his statement, which sounded more like a defense attorney’s closing argument than a prosecutor’s announcement of a failed bid for indictment. But, he went on, “the inquiry does not end there. The law allows a law enforcement officer to use deadly force in certain situations.” And according to his grand jury’s decision, this was one of them: “They determined that no probable cause exists to file any charge against Officer Wilson.” Not even probable cause! This is not the much higher courtroom standard of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Know my name [Flickr page]

Never mind these inconvenient bits of evidence, all supposedly given due consideration by the grand jury: Eleven witnesses said Mr. Brown was running away from Officer Wilson when he was being fired upon, as opposed to just three who said he wasn’t.³Twelve of them said Mr. Brown put his hands in the air when he was being shot at, as opposed to two who said he didn’t.⁴ Five witnesses said Officer Wilson continued firing, repeatedly, at Mr. Brown while he was on the ground, as opposed to four who said he didn’t.⁵

These figures (and some of my wording about them) are from a very informative and disturbing table of witness interviews composed by Laura Santhanam and Vanessa Dennis for PBS Newshour. Take a look; it’s important.

One person listed as a witness in that table isn’t included in these tallies–Darren Wilson. Why not? Because his testimony was self-serving and unchallenged, his very appearance before the grand jury a gift from an easygoing prosecutor. As Justice Scalia–no friend of liberal causes–wrote for the majority in United States v. Williams, “[N]either in this country nor in England has the suspect under investigation by the grand jury ever been thought to have a right to testify, or to have exculpatory evidence presented.” That’s because the grand jury’s function is “only to examine ‘upon what foundation [the charge] is made’ by the prosecutor,” rather than inquiring “‘upon what foundation [the charge may be] denied,’ or otherwise to try the suspect’s defenses.”

And why wasn’t Wilson challenged? Because Bob McCulloch, the person who was supposed to do that job in a trial after obtaining the indictment he was ostensibly seeking, didn’t bother to do so when allowing Wilson to appear in this grand jury proceeding, long and extensive as it was. That’s certainly the impression attorney and media legal analyst Lisa Bloom gave in various fiery tweets she launched into Tuesday night’s angry darkness.

Kids playing outside Michael Brown’s funeral

“So many missed opportunities for cross examination of Wilson,” she wrote in one. There should “have been a grueling session, not the tea party the transcript shows.”

In another, she said, “Maybe we should take up a collection to teach the Ferguson prosecutors how to cross examine an adverse witness. Step 1: ask tough questions.”

And then there was this scathing summary she offered about the way McCulloch did (or didn’t do) his job: “An attorney who does not aggressively cross-examine the target of an investigation is an attorney who does not want to get to the truth.”

There is a lot of suspicion about McCulloch not wanting much truth when it came to the way the real witnesses were treated, too. The New York Daily News (admittedly, not law review material) points out that one of them who “testified he saw Brown on his knees with his hands up” had been “ridiculed by prosecutors”:

“Basically just about everything that you said on Aug. 13, and much of what you said today isn’t consistent with the physical evidence that we have in this case, OK,” the prosecutor said.

Fist bump across the divide, with Lt. Jerry Lohr

In the view of Ronald Kuby, a defense attorney the News interviewed for their article, that “wildly improper commentary encapsulates what the prosecutors were doing. Steering the grand jury not to indict.” ⁶

Shaun King asked his 103,000 Twitter followers to think about this on Tuesday: “Have you ever, in your life, seen a prosecutor more proud that he did not get an indictment than McCulloch was tonight?”

This discussion would be incomplete without a mention of the physical evidence–two autopsy reports that apparently match up with Wilson’s testimony, self-serving and unchallenged though it was.⁷ I’ll be candid here, in a highly charged subject area where candor seems to be in short supply: It speaks to my own sympathies toward the black community and against the prosecutor that I did not include it in the original version of this essay until a friend on Facebook pointed it out.

So here we go, briefly, because it’s late. If I had been inclined to support Wilson’s point of view from the outset, I probably would have focused on this part and the essay would have taken on a different tone. We are subjective creatures, all of us. I try to be honest about that mental limitation, at least, and work to overcome it.

The St. Louis County Medical Examiner’s report is currently accessible here, and a private one performed for Mr. Brown’s family is here. I’ll let the analysis from two media sources do the talking here. The first is by Eyder Peralta and Krishnadev Calamur of National Public Radio, not exactly a hotbed of reactionary racism. Peralta and Calamur came up with “two findings of major importance” in the autopsy reports.

• “First, the autopsy found that Michael Brown was never shot in the back, as some early witnesses claimed.”

• “Second, they found Brown’s blood inside the police car and on Wilson’s gun. This implies that there was close-range contact as Wilson alleges.”

They also note “the photographs taken of Wilson on the day of the confrontation” and the diagnosis doctors gave him of just having a bruise. That, they say, “seems to cast some doubt on Wilson’s testimony about the intensity of the confrontation.” ⁸

The other media analysis I came across in my late-stage rebalancing effort was an articleby Paul G. Cassell, a law professor at the University of Utah. “The physical evidence,” he concludes, “gave no reason to doubt Wilson’s testimony.” Cassell reviewed the reports and the Medical Examiner’s testimony and says

the ME thought that the soot would be indicative of the gun that fired the bullet causing the wound having been only 6 to 9 inches away. The soot was consistent with that discharged from a gun. The official report from the Office of Medical Examiner later confirmed that “the previously described particles of foreign particulate matter are consistent with products that are discharged from the barrel of a firearm.”

The significance of this wound and related physical evidence, says Cassell,

is that it places Brown’s right hand within 6 to 9 inches of the barrel of Wilson’s firearm. This physical evidence is thus quite consistent with Wilson’s testimony that Brown was trying to get hold of Wilson’s weapon, creating a fear in Wilson that he was going to get shot. It also creates a problem for those who view Brown as having been somehow accosted by Wilson and was just trying to escape.⁹

Reasonable doubt? Perhaps so. Does it make all that witness evidence just evaporate and eliminate probable cause for a trial that could get this material examined, under proper cross-examination? Here’s Lisa Bloom again, in a few tweets she sent on November 27, after going over Wilson’s testimony a second time:

If Mike Brown twisted Wilson’s gun-holding hand backwards into Wilson’s pelvis, why doesn’t Wilson have a wrist injury or even redness?

Prosecutors never asked Darren Wilson how Mike Brown “grabbed” his gun without leaving a single fingerprint.

“What do I do not to get beaten inside my car,” Darren Wilson said he thought. Yet prosecutors never asked why he didn’t hit the gas.

And does the physical evidence get McColloch off the hook for the way he conducted this whole exercise, seeming to act more as Wilson’s defense attorney than the people’s prosecutor? It doesn’t seem so to me, even as a non-attorney with my admitted biases.

Remember, Michael Brown’s family had no effective advocate during this process, nobody challenging Wilson and actually accusing him of a crime. That was the prosecution’s job, and a lot of people with real expertise are saying he didn’t do it. There still seems to be an ugly underside of the whole mess, and a valid reason for a lot of people to be angry. Especially ones who look more like Michael Brown and Dawon Gore than Robert McColloch or Darren Wilson or the vast majority of police in their neighborhoods, and have seen justice denied time after time.

The American Bar Association’s standards for prosecutors refer to the role as “an administrator of justice, an advocate, and an officer of the court.” ¹⁰ Mr. McCulloch didn’t seem too focused on the second part of that. You know, the bit about advocating for the citizens he serves, most of whom are black and would presumably prefer not to have cops get away with shooting at them.

Black men are people, too [Flickr page]

He began his announcement with a criticism not of the guy he was supposed to be prosecuting, but of social media for “accounts filled with speculation and little if any solid, accurate information.” His unusually protracted grand jury hearing–25 days!–ended without even a recommendation that charges be filed.

According to Eric Citron, however, this was “not your typical grand jury investigation.” That was the subtitle of his blog posting Tuesday night discussing how United States v. Williams applied to this case. The grand jury process “protected Wilson because the prosecutor was willing to let it,” he wrote. He wasn’t willing to come out and say for certain that “this is a case about prosecutorial or institutional bias in which Wilson was treated far too well.”

Perhaps it was, he said, but maybe “it is a case about reviving a much more robust role for the grand jury, so that others get the same legal process on display this week.” Yeah, maybe so. And perhaps the Koch brothers will start voting Democrat.

But there’s no avoiding the barbs in the point Citron made earlier in his essay. The prosecutor would have done things differently if he wanted things to go differently:

[W]hen a prosecutor really wants an indictment, you would not expect the grand jury process to look anything like what happened in Darren Wilson’s case. The prosecutor would have no obligation to put forward the conflicting eyewitness testimony, or introduce pictures of Officer Wilson’s injuries–although grand jury members could ask for them if they somehow knew they existed. Instead, the prosecutor could put forward only the first few witnesses corroborating his own theory, along with the evidence that Wilson fired ten shots from a substantial distance away.

Former prosecutor Charlie Reecewas not so reserved: “I can tell you the way that the prosecutor handled this case is a miscarriage of justice. This is just horrible.” ¹¹

Is there really any question about why people protest when the system has failed them, why a few (and it only takes a few) in the thick of things might start fires and overturn vehicles? ¹²

“Why protest?” tweeted Deray Mckesson on Tuesday night as it was happening. “Because we refuse to be scared into silence. Because we refuse to drown in a pool of our tears.” Drbrowne tweeted, “Don’t [you] dare package our fears and pains, sell them back to us in exchange for rage and tears, then label us irrational, uncivilized, savage.”

And from Stephanie came this tweet with the #BlackLivesMatterhashtag: “My God what must the ’60s have been like?! Fear. Injustice. Brutality. Racial divide. Sounds a bit like 2014.” Unfortunately, it sounds like the nation W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about 111 ago, too, one that had “not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.” ¹³

Notes

Don’t Look Down! [Flickr page]

At the close of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got–a Republic or a Monarchy?” Franklin replied, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” ¹

And for a little over two hundred years, we managed to do so. But it is now unraveling before our eyes. The government is no longer accountable to its citizens for much of anything. And many of those citizens are too demoralized and misinformed to even care.

Black men are shot and choked to death, and their police killers get off without any consequence? Those dark thugs must have had it coming, says the right-wing echo chamber to itself inside its comfortable white suburbs.

The NSA is snooping on the communications of every American citizen without warrant or cause, against the clear wording of the Fourth Amendment? I’ve got nothing to hide, says the mass of boot-licking authoritarians, and their elected representatives keep the surveillance duly funded as if Edward Snowden had never breathed a word.

Rough Weather [Flickr page]

Rep. Justin Amash, one of the few exceptional members of the U.S. House of Representatives with some principles about the Constitution he swore to uphold and defend, said on his Facebook timeline that the new Intelligence Authorization Act, H.R. 4681, contains “one of the most egregious sections of law I’ve encountered during my time as a representative: It grants the executive branch virtually unlimited access to the communications of every American.” ² And it passed the House 325-100.

The CIA tortures people, sometimes to the point of death, and attempts to dodge and bully to cover it up? The only person charged, who will ever be charged, is the whistleblower. Support our brave men and women in uniform, say the bootlickers, confident that they will never have a feeding tube shoved up their ass in a wet dungeon.

Again, Rep. Amash (the man is a Republican!):

It’s with a heavy heart that I’ve begun reading the CIA torture report released by the Senate intelligence committee. It documents inhumane acts committed by representatives of our government. Members of our intelligence community have extraordinarily difficult jobs, and the rank-and-file employees serve our country with distinction. It should sadden all of us that a few in the intelligence community have cast a shadow on the important work of so many.

“Most troubling for a free country such as ours,” he continues, “is the repeated, perhaps systematic deception committed by senior public servants against elected officials who are entrusted with supervising their work. The nature of intelligence work requires certain secrecy, but it is unconscionable for senior appointees to hide essential details of interrogation from Congress and even the president.” ³

The Constitution for which Franklin and Jefferson and the rest of those brave idealists risked their lives, the document that brought reverential tears to my eyes when I looked at a leaf of it under glass at the National Archives one year–is becoming nothing more than a quaint relic. Like the millions of Bibles that sit unread on shelves and pulpits, it is now mostly ignored by those who have sworn allegiance to it. Except, in both cases, there are a handful of selected portions still convenient for the party line.

Notes

Winding Road [Flickr page]

Religions like to claim that the Truth ever was as they now are. They have the pure doctrine revealed by God, to them and their forebears, unchanging and eternal. If you want to find out what Christianity was from the moment that Jesus breathed the Holy Ghost on the disciples, for example, you need only visit the Conservative Laestadian church I used to attend.

Inconveniently, other churches make their own claims. The Churches of Christ claim to be, well, the Churches of Christ–just as they were established by the Apostles traveling around in the book of Acts, except perhaps for the Greek architecture. Joseph Smith did notinvent a new religion involving crudely imitated King James English, an entirely mistranslated Egyptian funerary text, and adapted Masonic rituals and symbols, harrumph the Mormon powers that be. No, he restored“the Church of Jesus Christ to the earth, which God authorized to be established ... by a wiser, heaven-tutored Joseph Smith, once again allowing everyone to receive the joy and blessings that come from living it.”

What is really happening, of course, is that religions make their ancestors in their own images. The past is dimly and selectively visualized through a screen imposed by the present. Whatever is being practiced today–strict confession of sins or more relaxed general absolution, instrumental music or just singing a capella, magic underwear, whatever–is absolutely what happened all along with the true believers of yore.

But it isn’t.

Lurching through Laestadianism

There are many cases of ecclesiastical evolution in my old church, none of which its elders are eager to acknowledge. Some examples that come to mind: Nobody stands in the pews rejoicing about grace anymore, false spirits are nowhere to be found, sinners have largely dispensed with confession and all its mental hang-ups, and a lot of entertainment video is being watched on private little screens. But those are peripheral things I personally observed during my decades of membership. A larger issue, and one that few believers know about (I certainly didn’t, until researching it), is that the church’s main theme of proclaiming sins forgiven has slowly evolved into existence over the entire span of Christian history.

The Laestadian Lutheran church centers its doctrine and practice around a ritual of absolution that the Bible declines to illustrate with a single solid example, even in Saul’s conversion or the case where it would seem most instructive–Peter’s denial of Christ.¹ The whole thing revolves around the preaching of “the gospel” (the term being narrowly construed for doctrinal purposes), a proclamation that one’s sins are forgiven in Jesus’ name and blood, which was never actually used in any of the Gospels! ²

Church history is also a problem for this group’s idea of itself as a special group of believers who have passed along the keys of absolution in an unbroken chain from Jesus and the disciples. There’s just no historical evidence for that. Rather, it is clear that there was a slow evolution of Christian thought, over many painful centuries, about the nature of sin and to what extent it might be forgiven.

My research and discussion of this topic is the one part of An Examination of the Pearl that I dare to consider original. Writing my conclusions about it also marked the end of my belief in the doctrines of Conservative Laestadianism. This is important stuff if you’re a Laestadian of any type, so let me summarize what I wrote about it in §5.1.2 with the next few paragraphs.

Arriving at Absolution

The earliest Christian writers never thought to mention what became such an important aspect of Catholic (and, I might add, Conservative Laestadian) doctrine and practice, the absolution of sins by the proclamation of another human being. And the fact that they wrote about other means by which sins could be forgiven makes their silence about absolution all the more problematic.

At first, sins could only be forgiven once, and only once, through the spiritual washing of baptism. Then the idea of a second chance materialized, but that was all you’d get. This “two strikes and you’re out” arrangement evolved into a harsh system of cruel penalties that dished out misery and humiliation to anyone who dared confess to committing sin.

It wasn’t until the fifth century that the bishops started sharing the keys with ordinary priests and limits of grace finally disappeared. Even then, it seems that there was little attention paid to absolution into the early middle ages, at least when it came to the practice of everyday Christians.

All in all, there was a tortuously slow expansion of those Christians who were authorized to use the keys. At first the authority was neither claimed by nor given to anyone at all. Then the bishops appeared, keys in hand. Then the priests to whom they hesitantly delegated their authority got copies, and later monks did, too, within the walls of their closed communities. And finally, when Luther’s system appeared, laymen got their chance to employ the keys, in theory if not so apparently in actual practice.³

As if all that weren’t bad enough, it turns out that Laestadianism began without its 19th-century founders using the supposedly indispensable keys to let themselves into the Kingdom.⁴ Things had hummed along with visions and revelations for a good nine years before one of those guys, Juhani Raattamaa, finally stumbled on the idea of comforting a desperate woman by preaching that her sins were forgiven via his proclamation that it was so. He was struck by how well it seemed to work and, upon returning home, found support for what he’d done in Luther’s writings.⁵ And on that pebble of forgotten Lutheran practice was built an entire church.

No wonder church elders don’t like people to read or think too much about their own history.

A Return to Ecstacy?

Knowing how much my former religion has evolved while simultaneously claiming never to do so, I got to thinking about what that church might look like in the future. It certainly will be very different than it is now.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see all but a devoted core group surrender the idea that contraception is a sin. That core group, of course, will then be the source for new members, most all of whom are supplied via procreation. Laestadianism attracts hardly any converts in its long-standing population centers of Finland and North America. Babies are the key–lots and lots of babies.

But there are two places where Laestadianism is attracting converts, hundreds of them: Togo and Ghana. What would a West African Laestadian Lutheran Church look like in the year 2044, as the (further evolved) movement celebrates the Bicentennial of Laestadius’s awakening in the presence of Milla Clementsdotter aka “Lapp Mary”?

Perhaps things will go full circle, in a sense. The services of African Laestadians might wind up a lot like those of the spiritually awakened Sámi 200 years earlier, with fervent preaching and ecstatic outbursts.

My latest short story “Africa 2044” is a brief musing about how that might appear as seen through the eyes of Koffi, a lukewarm believer who is thinking too much while translating a sermon. It’s available via this link or under the “Fiction” sidebar to the right.

Notes

The Kingdom of God–about 0.002% of the world’s population (click to enlarge)

One fascinating aspect of my old church is its claim to be “God’s Kingdom,” the one little flock of true believers that exists anywhere on earth. Almighty God, who wants everybody saved, has for some reason stashed his keys of reconciliation in a place where almost nobody would know to look.¹ But, the story goes, he is going to damn almost everybody for not finding them.

The (Finnish) True Church

You see, after getting Christianity spread across the planet over the course of two thousand years, God has chosen those 100,000 or so Finns and descendants of Finns who were lucky enough to have been “born into a Christian home,” plus maybe another thousand converts, as his “grace children.” They comprise about 0.002% of the world’s population. Everybody else–other kinds of Laestadians (there are several), other kinds of Lutherans, all those generic Christians in their innumerable “dead faiths”–God is unwilling or unable to help.²

It’s quite a story, breathtaking in its audacity. Yet it’s so deeply ingrained into Conservative Laestadian doctrine that it’s hardly ever spelled out in sermons.³ When a preacher laments the loved ones who have given up this precious gift of living faith or forsaken the fellowship of God’s Children or left the Kingdom, everybody knows what he’s talking about. Those poor misguided saps are no longer members of the Laestadian Lutheran Church, and they’d better not die in that condition. It doesn’t matter if they still profess the basics of Christianity, perhaps more sincerely then ever, or became (spoken in hushed tones) one of those people who don’t even believe in God. They’re spiritually dead just the same, and headed for hellfire if physical death completes the equation to yield eternal death.

Just that one orange dot.

“God’s Kingdom has an address” is one old saying I heard in sermons and discussions from time to time. But the church doesn’t go out of its way to inform the outside world about just how detailed the directions are. “The kingdom of God is to be found on earth according to the teachings of Jesus,” says its How We Believe web page. “It is a kingdom of grace on earth and a kingdom of glory in heaven. The kingdom of God is one-minded in faith, doctrine, and love.” Another page, The Kingdom of Heaven, gives a few hints of something a bit more specific: “In this world God’s kingdom is hidden beneath the flaws and faults of believing people ... What we can offer you is God’s forgiveness in Jesus Christ.”

That’s a nice enough offer, but it omits the unpleasant yet absolutely essential detail that no other offer will do, from anyone else and that you will fry in hell forever if you don’t take them up on it. It’s like a doctor knowing that a certain 70-person clinic down a side road somewhere near the Maltby Cafe off Highway 522 has the only batch of experimental chemo in the entire Seattle Metro area that can cure your rare and imminently fatal form of cancer. Imagine her just telling you to head north from Olympia looking for a good oncology center, mentioning some obscure one nobody’s ever heard of that’s a two-hour drive away, and then hanging up.⁴

Why not just come out with the bracing truth and “call a spade a spade,” as one LLC preacher is fond of saying? If you believe that your clinic has this indispensable medication, that your church is the only way people can avoid the horrors of hellfire, it seems that you would want to convey the absolute urgency of the situation. “Don’t go anywhere else, you hear? This is the place!” I asked an LLC elder about it some years ago: Why wasn’t the church website clearer about who will be saved and who will not? He replied, “Well, we don’t want to scare people off.” ⁵

Perhaps vagueness is considered desirable for PR purposes, but the exclusivity doctrine is certainly something that members are expected to believe. The LLC’s paper “Unity of Faith and Understanding” makes that very clear, at least to those who know the intended meanings of “house of God” and “saving faith”:

It is no small matter when an individual or group, either secretly or openly, begins to believe that the house of God is not necessarily “the pillar and ground of truth” in all matters of soul and conscience or that there is more than one saving faith.⁶

So I will provide the public with some clarity about one of my old church’s key doctrines where it declines to do so: All of the billions of mentally competent individuals over the age of accountability who now occupy this planet other than Conservative Laestadians are headed for an eternity of unthinkable torture. “Preciously believing” ones, that is, not those fence-sitting “New Age” believers or party animals with grievous hidden sin on their consciences. And, unless the world finally ends after two thousand years of failed expectations, that same horrible fate will be shared by almost all of the billion or so of the world’s children as they reach the age of accountability without any clue about how to be saved.⁷

Are you on board with this? Head back to church or visit llchurch.org if you have felt the call of God’s Kingdom. But first you might want to consider the other groups that each claim they are the only true church. Why should just one of them automatically be given the benefit of the doubt, after all?

The (Filipino) True Church

I was in Hawaii on a Sunday morning last month, and visited an Iglesia ni Cristo church I’d spotted while sightseeing the day before. The name means “The Church of Christ” in Tagalog. It was a group I’d written about in An Examination of the Pearl, and I just had to see for myself what its services were like. My wife slept in.

Iglesia ni Cristo church on Kauai, Hawaii

A surprised but polite usher escorted me to a seat near the back of their small sanctuary. The congregation was strictly divided between men and women on opposite sides of a central aisle. I sat down and flipped through the songbook as the congregation halfheartedly accompanied an organ and a choir of white-robed Filipino women.

It was interesting to see how similar the messages in the songs were to what I grew up singing. One of them told of “The kingdom, so glorious and blest,” into which, the singer was to recall aloud, “Motivated by faith, I gladly entered” and where “now I do receive / The care for my once-troubled soul.” It is “Within His kingdom”, the song said, where the “great mercy and grace” of the Father is found, along with “His teachings, great beyond compare.” Another song began, “This lonely land is not my true home,” expressing the same yearning for eternity as a beloved old Song of Zion I heard in warm little sanctuaries for nearly 40 years: My home is not here where I journey, ah, no, it is far, far away.⁸

Those sanctuaries were and still are filled with Finns whose ancestors (in my case, two Finnish grandparents) had left an earthly homeland on the other side of the Atlantic. And in the rough wooden interior of this little church in Hawaii, I sat amidst people whose ancestral origins lay across a different ocean, the Pacific. I was the only white person in the building, looking at the backs of about 150 dark-haired heads, plus the blond-dyed hair of a guy right in front of me who must have been the local rebel.

Actually, I suspect there were a few more rebels with me in those back rows, young guys who reluctantly dragged themselves to their mandatory Sunday morning church attendance. The one to my left was furiously bouncing his knee and shifting position the whole time. And I’m pretty sure I heard some audible snickering behind me at a few points during the preacher’s fervent oratory.

As an outsider, I certainly found it amusing, though I was far too polite to give any indication of that. Imagine stuff like “We cannot neglect our offering to almighty God!” shouted sing-song fashion over a jabbing pointed finger, by a guy with black helmet hair, a thick Asian accent, and a voice that bordered dangerously close to a squeak. Despite all his efforts, to which some people in the rows ahead of me responded with evident or at least well-acted emotion, I walked out of the place without the slightest pang of fear or interest in hearing more of his preaching.

You would have, too, whether you are religious or not. You simply do not take this group’s claims seriously. You may never even have heard of it before now. But it teaches that you are going to hell, and it has about five million members.

Sound Familiar?

The Iglesia ni Cristo began in the Philippines by the inspiration of one Felix Manalo in 1914, after reaching “a pivotal point in his personal religious odyssey.” He “embarked on a programme of evening evangelism,” which yielded about 100 converts within the first year.⁹

They think you are wrong, and there are a lot of them.

Fairly early in the group’s history, some members emigrated to America and, with guidance from the leadership back home, established congregations at their new locations.¹⁰ As with Laestadianism, though, the American adherents still represent only a fraction of the total worldwide membership. And neither movement has attracted substantial interest outside its original ethnic group; most everybody is a descendant of immigrants from the old country. If what I saw in Hawaii was any indication, God’s chosen people in the U.S. are almost all Filipino.¹¹

Today, Manalo figures prominently in the church’s history, and his grandson Eduardo is now its leader, the “Executive Minister.” But the church considers itself “of God and of Christ,” and says Manalo is only “God’s instrument in preaching the gospel of salvation in these last days.” He was, after all, “the first one to proclaim about the Church of Christ” in the Philippines where most of the church’s members are still found today.¹²

The story is not too different in structure from Laestadian lore about Lars Levi receiving the Gospel from one member of an obscure group of “Readers” and then unleashing it from his pulpit in Karesuando. And the spiritual successors of Laestadius also disclaim him as any kind of an object of worship, though the ones in the OALC sure devote a lot of their service to reverent mentions of his name and readings of his written sermons.

Complete unity! Except they aren’t Laestadians.

Naturally, one true church means just one true doctrine: “Unity in the Church is quite significant, because our unity includes God and Christ. It is wrong to destroy this unity.” ¹³ Again there is a striking familiarity between these words from the Philippines and the ones coming from the LLC. They really want everybody on board with the party line, and there is only one party line.

Choose Wisely

The Iglesia ni Cristo makes the same exclusivity claim as each schismatic branch of Laestadianism does for itself. (Obviously, only one of them can be correct about it, at most.) If you are not a member of the Church, “you will not be saved on the Day of Judgment.” ¹⁴ And what they mean by “the Church” is very specific: “The prevailing belief that all churches belong to God is false. Christ founded only one Church–the church of Christ.” ¹⁵ Man receives “redemption and the forgiveness of sins” only through this Church. “In God’s scheme of salvation, Christ and the Church of Christ are inseparable” ¹⁶

The Church of Christ

That quoted material is from Iglesia ni Cristo’s materials, but it could just as well have come from the SRK/​LLC, OALC, IALC, or FALC. If they could be persuaded to come out and actually say it publicly, that is.

I have been in contact with people who have left all of those branches of Laestadianism as well as the Church of Christ (Boston Movement), the “Churches of Christ,” “the Truth” aka the 2x2s or “church without a name,” and More Than Conquerors Faith Churchof Birmingham, Alabama. Indeed, for most of the seven groups listed besides my own former SRK/​LLC Laestadianism, my conversations and correspondence have with more than ex-member from each group. They all spoke and wrote to me about their experiences in a church where everybody in all the others is considered damned to hell, including the sincere believers I grew up with.¹⁷

The nerve of them, I thought about the churches these people had left. Then we smiled together about how firmly that same outrageous and indefensible idea had remained implanted in each of our brains, before that other ex-exclusivist ever had the slightest clue about my old church or I ever did about theirs. And our respective former churches still go on with their self-absorbed preaching, condemning each other and everybody else without knowing or caring to know.

Notes

Last summer I stopped at one of our remaining used bookstores in town and picked up an old hardback “Treasury of Great Bible Fiction.” Most of the stories in it are pretty cheesy, but one of them really impressed me with its beautiful, powerful writing and realistic depiction of the underlying Bible tale. It was an excerpt from a 1928 novel Eden by Murray Sheehan.

An Amazon search led me to one of those oddball used & rare booksellers online. Soon I had myself a hardback copy of Eden, almost ninety years old. After reading through its 200 or so yellowed pages, I came away just as impressed with the rest of the book as I’d been with the excerpt. It’s a great retelling of the Genesis human-origins story, wonderfully written and still very engaging to read nearly a century later.

This thing deserves to be a treasured classic, I thought. Why isn’t there an ebook version of it, or at least a paperback reprint? To my delight, I found that it has passed into the public domain.¹Edenhas been set free, the best work of Bible fiction I’ve come across yet. And now my indie publisher Tellectual Press is making a reprint available, not just as a paperback but also for the Amazon Kindle.

Bob Price, my friend and collaborator on another Edenic effort, agreed with my assessment of the book, and we co-authored an Introduction for the reprint. As we explain there, what Sheehan came up with was a fine contemporary example of a time-honored literary art known as midrash.²

Eden, Ch. 3 (paperback reprint)

The ancient rabbis peering through their treasured scrolls of the Hebrew Bible practiced this literary art, interpreting scripture passages (especially the difficult ones) by retelling them. They provided their own versions, wider in scope, which contained plot details and additional characters and circumstances that they hoped might make more sense of the originals. The biblical original was just the tip of an iceberg to be revealed by their literary sonar.

Their results are creative and charming, whether or not they really cast light on the biblical texts that inspired them. And, as shown by Sheehan’s fine novel as well as the release of Bible-themed movies from The Ten Commandments (1956) to Noah (2014), the art of midrash has never died.

Murray Sheehan’s midrash puts narrative meat on the bones of an old rabbinic effort to explain a contradiction between the Bible’s first and second chapters. They are both there in our Bibles today, contradictions and all, because whoever compiled them together didn’t want to omit anything. It had already became sacred tradition in a lot of people’s eyes, if not his own. Cut any detail and you could be sure that some busybody from the ancient Israelite equivalent of a KJV-only Bible College would complain.³

Eden, Ch. 4 (Kindle reprint)

And so Genesis 1:27 has God creating Adam with a wife at the very outset while Genesis 2:18-22 has Him⁴ making one out of the lonesome Adam’s rib after the dust of His creation project had already settled.⁵ That gives Sheehan a great villain for his novel, the wily and sensual Lilith.⁶

In Eden, Adam and Lilith have something of a relationship before Eve shows up, but it never gets consummated with anything other than “a wild kiss, the first in all Creation” (Part 1, Ch. 10). God doesn’t like the way things are headed, so He closes Adam’s heart to Lilith and brings Eve into the picture. He provides Adam with a mate who’s less likely to get him into trouble.

But He has counted Lilith out too soon. She manipulates Mr. Serpent into tempting Adam and Eve into eating that apple. (Then things go badly, as we all know.) In a clever twist on the Christian interpretation of the story, Sheehan replaces Satan with Lilith. She, not the Hoofed One, becomes the mastermind behind the Serpent’s mischief.

Creation of Man [Flickr page]

Another fascinating bit of midrash in this novel deals with the puzzling vestiges of polytheism that remain in the Genesis creation accounts. Understandably, those are never even noticed by most casual Bible readers. We provide some details in the Introduction, but the bottom line is that this is another biblical contradiction between older and newer texts.

The only thing Christian theologians could think of to account for the leftover polytheism was the Christian Trinity. And so, they figured, the Father was conferring with the Son and the Holy Ghost back in Eden. Sheehan follows this tradition, providing some snatches of dialogue between the Persons of the Trinity at a few points throughout his story. He has God shaking His head from His divine vantage point in the skies above, watching Lilith plot Eve’s downfall and muttering about it, consoling Himself with a “second Voice within the Father,” and–via yet another Voice–philosophizing about free will.

Sheehan showed a lot of courage in letting his dialogue explore the inevitable implication of a tree-tending Trinity in Genesis: God doesn’t just talk to Himself; He winds up like some poor guy off his meds who carries on a full conversation between separate voices in his head. And since nobody who defends Trinitarianism thinks God is psychotic, the inevitable result is that He is essentially polytheistic anyway!

Eden also bravely and cleverly tackles the dilemmas of omniscience and omnipotence vs. the Fall, the oddities of the First Marriage (perhaps the only one with any real claim to being a match made in heaven), and the sibling rivalry between Cain and Abel. And as a parting gift to the reader, he goes the old rabbis one better and answers the oldest of biblical paradoxes as no one has ever thought to do before.

It’s a great book, and I hope you enjoy it, too.

You can still get original hardbacks of Eden from those oddball online booksellers, for not much more than the $9.99 cover price of Tellectual Press’s paperback reprint. They obviously won’t include the Introduction from which I’ve adapted (in part) this posting, though, or the reprint’s crisp formatting, in both paperback and ebook. (The Kindle version is $6.99.) Plus, you can get the book in both formats for just an additional $0.99 with Amazon’s matchbook feature.

Notes

Round trip [Flickr page]

A friend of mine from my old Laestadian Lutheran church told me the other day that he once went back so he could drink and get stoned with the guys there. It seems that their parents had forbidden them from hanging out with him once he attained unbeliever status, and he didn’t care for the hard-core attitude of the party crowd at his school. The school kids he did like didn’t party as much as the Laestadian guys.

So he “repented” and was allowed back into the company of his lifelong friends, free to live it up with them on Saturday nights and sit through sermons alongside them on Sunday mornings. Their well-meaning parents only witnessed the second part of that social interaction, of course. That was a while ago; his partying days are over and he has left the church for good now.

There are a lot of people who go back for a while on their way out, for a variety of reasons that are seldom so amusing as I found his to be. Fundamentalist religion exerts a powerful social and psychological pull that forces them into a return trip or two before–if they can achieve escape velocity–their final trajectory to the universe beyond. They might spend years or even lifetimes stuck in unsettled orbits around Planet Faith, well within sight of everyone down there but at a tolerable distance from whatever absurd rules and doctrines made them take off in the first place.

Another person provided me with a fascinating little story about how this worked in his own life for over 20 years. He “encountered something that seriously strained” his faith and “started running up against all kinds of” conflicts between science, the Bible, and faith. “I didn’t know how to deal with this stuff and eventually I even began to doubt God,” he said. There was a lot of guilt,

even though I was living a life that would seem very moral and praiseworthy by most peoples’ standards. Unable to reconcile my conflicts, I simply unplugged and became religiously inactive. I did my best to simply switch off religion from my life and I found a lot of joy and richness in my new way of being but, having never really dealt with my faith issues, I still carried a lot of my old worldview under the hood. Also, coming from a very conservative and faith-oriented family, I had to keep up appearances for my parents’ sake.

He became close with a woman in the church he “had loved from afar for years,” and

eventually it became obvious that we were headed for marriage. But she was committed to marrying someone who was strong in the faith. And to me, a faithful life together with her sounded like a wonderful future. I committed to her and to myself that I would recommit myself. And boy did I try. From the beginning I had no intention of just going along to get her to marry me. I was going to be that man of faith that I thought I should be.

But his issues with the faith remained, as did his feelings of being inadequate and unacceptable. He diligently studied the church’s publications that attempted to address those issues, but they just weren’t cutting it anymore. Indeed, he said, they were

introducing me to more problems than I had been aware of originally. More and more it seemed like the apologetic answers were falling flat. After more than 20 years I finally realized the problem. This method of answering questions, which appeared to be scientific, was actually the exact opposite of science. If you start with your conclusion and cherry pick your evidence you can “prove” anything you want. It was anti-science.

A few times around [Flickr page]

Finally one day, he came across a passage of scripture that he just couldn’t reconcile. “My brain hurt from trying,” he said. “Finally I thought, ‘Hey, maybe I don’t have to believe all of it!’ Then, a few seconds later, ‘Maybe I don’t have to believe any of it!’” And then his “entire world changed. It was like the parallax shift when you close one eye and open the other, but the view from the other eye was of a completely new world.”

His wife remains in the church but is supportive of her husband, he said, and a “huge weight has been lifted. My greatest joy now is to be able to say ‘I don’t know’ and to ponder the possibilities. The need for certainty was so much more of a burden than I realized at the time.”

It’s a powerful story, isn’t it? Does it make any difference when you learn that my correspondent wasn’t a Laestadian or even a Protestant Christian? He’d never heard of Laestadianism before running into me.¹ That last deal-breaker passage of scripture he encountered was in the Book of Mormon, and the sign out in front of the building he still visits with his wife reads, “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.”

There are certainly differences between the church buildings and some of their troublesome scriptural passages. But they build upon the same shifting sands of the Bible–with all its contradictions, ancient outrages, and indisputable errors. And the stories–the hundreds of stories from people disillusioned with all their varied religions–sound much the same.

Bend in the path [Flickr page]

The author of I’m (No Longer) a Mormon: A Confessional writes eloquently about her own orbit around the LDS Church. “I felt like Eve in the Garden of Eden: My eyes had been opened. I had been lied to. Worse, I had spent decades living my life for those lies, trying to fashion myself into a being that conformed to the standard of those lies.” ²

Yet she stays, as do many others, and asks her readers to understand “our absolute desperation to believe what we’ve been taught, even if it makes absolutely no sense at all. Please pity us. This is no way to live, and coming out of it is pure and absolute agony.” ³

She does a frank assessment of the costs and benefits. “If I walk away from this church, everything I have ever known evaporates instantly.” She would forsake her faith along with her “understanding of the way the universe operates.” She would be largely ostracized or at least “publicly lambasted” by her entire social network, and lose the support of most of her and her husband’s family.

And if she leaves? What does she get from that? “The rug pulled out from under me. Live a lie, or live with the consequences. And I’m not abandoning all and following after Truth. I’m not leaving everything for something better. I’m just leaving.” ⁴

One ex-Laestadian correspondent “wanted to cave many times” but “knew I’d be back to square one.” That pull has lessened over the years, though it certainly can be a strong one. My own process of leaving is a testament to that, requiring a year of full-time effort to research and write a hefty doorstop of a book about the church: “Examining this pearl of Conservative Laestadianism was in some sense to cherish and value it. But I also had a very personal need to confront it, to stare down its threats and dismantle–to my own satisfaction at least–its most outrageous claims.” ⁵ There is, another correspondent notes, “such a huge codependency on everything church.”

Others leave and never look back. My favorite story in that regard was one I heard secondhand about a guy who announced to his family, “Not believing. Don’t want to talk about it.” And for him, that was that. An ex-Laestadian friend of mine has much the same mindset: “No interest in returning to the dark abyss.” Another says, “Knowing how hard it was to leave the first time was part of what kept me from caving in to pressure to come back. I didn’t want to go through it again, and once I was out, I knew I wasn’t going back to stay.”

Some ex-LLCers frame the matter in terms of personal integrity:

• “The pressure is real, although I don’t know how I would look at myself in the mirror if I went back.”

• “I have never considered going back. Even if I did in the future for who knows what reason, I would never be a ‘real’ believer again because I don’t agree with the church, so I would just be pretending.”

“Feeling very vulnerable, awkward and emotional,” another person “cracked and repented. Two hours later I started feeling the same old anxiety creeping in.” There was the old “doubt and disbelief,” which had started going away the further this person got from the LLC. “So I knew it wasn’t a real thing, I just had put myself in a very vulnerable spot. And when I went to church, people I didn’t know very well were more happy about it than I ever was. I knew nothing had changed inside, I had to decide–did I want to be truthful to myself or did I want to conform to the group?”

It’s not an easy path, still difficult in fact, “but I think it is the right way for me to go.”

Intersection [Flickr page]

The difficulty of the path is beautifully described–again with reference to Mormonism–in Libbie Hawker’s lyrical book Baptism for the Dead. The first-person protagonist reflects on an emotionally difficult departure from her childhood faith. She’d been having a passionate affair with “X,” a traveling photographer and painter right out of The Bridges of Madison County. He’s a shadowy outsider who fit his key into the lock of her latent doubts, revealing the broader perspective of a world outside the small-town Mormonism that had so frustrated her.

They flee Rexburg, Idaho for a photography road trip, taking in the natural beauty of the American West by day and each other in motel room beds by night. But the church follows her.

A beautiful book well worth reading.

She appreciates a certain irony about that, one that contributes to the return-trip phenomenon: Only after leaving Rexburg had she “come to doubt my doubt.” Everyone she’d “ever known was in that town. I could not picture a life that didn’t revolve around my community, assuming I could still call it my community at all. Yet what else did I have? An artist I had met only days before, the interior of his car, and the shifting crowds at scenic overlooks and highway rest stops.”

As she and X drive through the Grand Tetons and she reflects on her poor gay husband back home who’d tried to fit into the Mormon mold just like she had, unsuccessfully, she muses about “this ember inside of me, an animal red, an awful crimson. No matter how I try to smother it, it continues to glow.”

She feels crippled, silently wondering to herself and to X “how even a God I don’t believe in still has the power to rub the scales from my wings, how even when I am with you I can still feel that miserable brand inside me, smoking, and how sometimes I wish I did believe, just for the simplicity of it, for the ease of knowing that to want you and to have you is wrong, absolutely, unmistakably, simply–even though it feels as right as breathing.” ⁶

But she experienced all this with no belief in and thus no “fear of a vengeful God.” So why, she asks,

even after I left, did that wretched guilt consume me? It smoldered inside me; it obscured the world with its sickening smoke. And how could I feel so splendidly alive, so awakened to the world, with the bird in the pine trees scolding inside my head, with the pines moving in the breeze of my pulse, with the sunrise coloring my skin and my skin coloring the sunrise, and yet feel so ashamed of you, X, of my love for you, which was the very thing that had finally made me live? ⁷

Our other Mormon author, Regina Samuelson, concludes her book still in the closet, still uncertain about what to do, moving “forward one step at a time, hurt but hopeful, and desperately seeking Truth, no matter how difficult that truth may be for me to cope with or accept.”

“Please help me,” she asks from behind the veil of her pen name:

Please help us. While you cannot exactly understand our position unless you, too, have experienced it, I pray fervently that this book has helped in some small way for you to relate to those of us who are searching for answers, for understanding, and for love.

We are alone.⁸

It does seem that way at times. But she is not alone, and neither are you. Viewed as a whole, there are thousands of people leaving Mormonism and Laestadianism and many other high-control religious groups. There are online forums and websites for apostates from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Exclusive Brethren, Iglesia ni Cristo, the “Truth”, and even Islam–often at significant personal risk in that last case.

You can leave, for good, if that’s what you want to do. If you’re not ready–now or ever, for your own set of entirely understandable reasons–that’s perfectly fine. Lots of people manage to have happy, fulfilled lives inside of restrictive religions. For some of them, I’d wish nothing better. And it’s not like there’s any sort of hell awaiting you after you die because you decided not to become an unbeliever.

The reality, even from the vast majority of the Bible’s indications on the subject, is that there’s no hell at all. There is just this single brief lifetime, and the grains of its remaining days are dropping through that little passage in your hourglass one by one. So, if you are ready to leave, then do it already! Enjoy those remaining days free of that “dark abyss,” making your own choices about your life and with a set of your own beliefs–whatever they are–that you can openly and honestly call your own.

Notes

MOTHERS in God’s Kingdom often have many children, and they receive them all as precious blessings. Each child brings an individual personality and gifts to the family, and much joy to their mother and father, who do not wish to place artificial limitations on these blessings.

We often refer to God’s Kingdom itself as a spiritual mother. “Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all” (Gal. 4:26). “The mother feeds and cares for her children. So also does the Kingdom of God, the spiritual Mother, which Rebekah-mother in the Old Testament portrays” (By Faith, p. 31). God’s children are welcomed, nurtured, and loved by this mother, who accepts them with joy, just as the natural mother accepts all of the little ones she is given.

This abundance of love and welcoming grace has been a recent topic of discussion between members of the LLC, SFC, and SRK boards, as well as servants of the word in our respective sister organizations. With humble hearts and thanksgiving for God’s blessings and guidance, we have learned anew “what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height,” and “to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge” (Eph. 3:18). It has been revealed to us how much of an accepting and loving mother God’s Kingdom really is, perhaps more so than many of us in our weak understanding had realized.

Believers Around the World

There are, we must say along with one of our Lutheran confessional books, “truly believing and righteous people scattered throughout the whole world.” ¹ Our spiritual predecessor Martin Luther said in his time that there were “Christians in all the world,” that “no one can see who is a saint or a believer.” ² And so we understand that the Rebekah-mother gladly welcomes all who would be her children, whether they are in our particular assembly of believers or not.

God’s Kingdom is precious to us, “our beloved mother, whom we, her children, love” (SHZ 188). Here we find comfort and the forgiveness of our sins. But there is a danger of putting too much emphasis on God’s Kingdom as an organization, as an assembly of people, and making God Himself secondary to it. “I will not give my glory unto another” (Isaiah 48:11).

We can also look to the words of Luther in this: He wrote that anyone who “maintains that an external assembly or an outward unity makes a Church, sets forth arbitrarily what is merely his own opinion.” We must humbly agree with our brother in faith that there is not “one letter in the Holy Scriptures to show that such a purely external Church has been established by God.” ³

During our concluding meeting at the SRK offices in Oulu, we received much loving instruction from God’s Word and a spirit of unity. With tears of joy, one brother read simple instructions from the Bible about how we can know where the Spirit of God is: “Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God” (1 John 4:2). Every spirit, he repeated, and went on to read how we can know who God’s children are: “Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God” (1 John 4:15).

Another brother recalled that the Apostle Paul considered the Gentiles as equals in God’s eyes. He noted that this was a significant new revelation for the Old Covenant believers of that time, too. But there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek, Paul wrote, “for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him. For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Rom. 10:12-13).

A question arose about the preaching of the Gospel in the verses that follow: How can other people “call on him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher?” Luther wrote that whoever hears the Gospel and believes on it, and is baptized, is called and saved. And, he added, “the Gospel is nothing else than the preaching of Christ.” ⁴

We cannot allow our traditions about the Gospel and forgiveness to take away from God’s Word. “And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book” (Rev. 22:19). This portion says that whoever calls upon His name shall be saved and then simply points out that people cannot call on someone they haven’t yet heard of.

There were many around Paul who had no knowledge about Jesus. We certainly cannot say the same today of the many millions of people who faithfully read the same Bibles we have and praise God’s name in their own churches.

God’s Ways Are Beyond Human Comprehension

The mind of man rebels against such inclusiveness. Who are these strangers we are to consider as possible fellow-travelers on the way that leads to heaven? How do they get their sins forgiven? But these questions arise from our sin-corrupt flesh.

It is important to remember that God’s grace is not limited by the limitations of our carnal reasoning. “Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end” (Eph. 3:20).

Random, marginally relevant nature scene [Flickr page]

Apostle Paul reminds us, “Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all” (1 Cor. 12:4). We have seen many sorrowful incidents in our own history since the time of Laestadius where “the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith” (Mat. 23:23) have been forgotten over minor issues and personality differences, leading to needless strife and divisions. There “should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another” (1 Cor. 12:25).

Our brother Juhani Raattamaa, whose portrait hangs alongside Luther and Laestadius in some of our church buildings, honored the Apostle’s message during a spiritual storm that took place in our Zion about a hundred years ago. He continued to show love for a prominent servant of the word who had been rejected over obscure matters few of us can even recall anymore and who was forced to journey in faith with a group called the Esikoinen, or “Firstborn.” After the death of this “beloved brother and fellow laborer,” Raattamaa remembered him “with sorrow and joy, even though his body is resting in the bosom of his Fatherland, but his glorified soul is rejoicing in the Paradise of God.” ⁵

The question about how these other believers get their sins forgiven is easy to answer in the case of our Esikoinen brethren; they preach it in the name and blood of Jesus just as we do. There are thousands of them in the United States and Finland receiving this message with joy every Sunday. That forgiveness, Raattamaa said, has been given “to the flock in living faith which is scattered around the whole world of all peoples and tongues. The sermon of repentance and forgiveness of sins is established with them.” ⁶

Have we been like John when he forbade a stranger from casting out devils in Jesus’ name, just because the man did not walk with the disciples? The Lord of Life did not commend John for doing that. Rather, he said, “Forbid him not: for he that is not against us is for us” (Luke 9:50).

God’s Kingdom is not some entity located in Minnesota or Oulu, just as it was “not bound to Rome” in Luther’s day. Rather, it is “as wide as the world, the assembly of those of one faith, a spiritual and not a bodily thing, for that which one believes is not bodily or visible.” ⁷

Boundless Grace

Paul said that God wants all men to be saved and that they would come to the knowledge of the truth. Therefore it is not the will of God that anyone be lost. He has not prepared hell for men, but for the devil and his angels.⁸ The Lord, Peter writes, is “not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (2 Pet. 3:9).

With our weak understanding, can we say that God has not been able to achieve His will except when it comes to our small Zion? “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8).

Jesus told His disciples, “Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:32). Certainly they were a small group when He spoke those words, for the same reason that Paul wrote about those who had not heard. God’s promises of the Old Covenant had only just been fulfilled in the few decades since Jesus’ birth. In our time, two thousand years later, the world is filled with people who are happy to take on the name of a Christian. We should not hasten to pass judgment on their faith. “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven” (Luke 6:37).

Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was sent for the sins of the whole world, not just for ours. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved” (John 3:16). It is grace of grace to be in God’s Kingdom. “Our faith is the greatest of gifts we could own / Through Christ we are given the hope of a crown” (SHZ 403). But now, in His time, God is revealing unto us that we should not be too quick to say that others are not among His own as well. “God is nigh unto all them that call upon him, to all that call upon him in truth” (Psalm 145:18-20).

Important disclaimer and commentary:

Notes

Photo credit: Rosie English

It has been at least 2200 years since the Song of Songs celebrated the raw sensuous beauty and passion of sex. That book probably holds the record as the one least referenced in Lutheran church services. Just try to imagine the preacher wearing his Sunday suit and sitting stiffly behind his pulpit, reading, “Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits” (4:16). Or this (7:6):

Given how much Christianity has wielded the Bible (the same one in which the Song of Songs appears, oddly, like a bikini on an Amish grandmother) to supress human sexuality, it is worthwhile to stop and reconsider what a normal and natural part of life sex really is. We are all of us the warm wet products of some sexual union decades ago, between two participants who each were the products of an earlier one. It goes all the way back to the grunted cave couplings of prehistoric hominids on furs by firelight, and beyond.

Bud Burst  [Flickr page]

Over its centuries of dominance, the church has sown in our society a minefield of hair-trigger offense that separate us from acceptance and expression of the very act that formed us. In the outermost reaches of fundamentalism, it is sinful for a young person to even linger on thoughts about how this primal drive might at last be satisfied. The explosions of offense get louder if the poor sinner traverses further into the minefield: sex without children in mind, masturbation, sex before marriage, sex with someone of your own gender.

To that we can add a further boundary, sex outside marriage. It is one that most of society, myself included, still considers a valid taboo. Frankly, cheating is just a deceptive act of selfishness. But even extramarital sex has been a nuanced topic: What if, for example, all parties are consenting? I personally can’t imagine such an arrangement, but who am I to judge? In the early 1500s, someone more radical than myself about the idea suggested this course of discussion for a sexually dissatisfied wife:

Look, my dear husband, you are unable to fulfill your conjugal duty toward me; you have cheated me out of my maidenhood and even imperiled my honor and my soul’s salvation; in the sight of God there is no real marriage between us. Grant me the privilege of contracting a secret marriage with your brother or closest relative, and you retain the title of husband so that your property will not fall to strangers. Consent to being betrayed voluntarily by me, as you have betrayed me without my consent.

The writer was Martin Luther.

Any proper Lutherans shocked by this or the Song of Songs, those who consider gay marriage to be a sure sign that the End of Times is upon us at last, may not be aware of just how much sex has been going on throughout human existence, and how varied it has been. I could mention the exploits of Enkidu in The Epic of Gilgamesh some four thousand years ago, or the incest and prostitution in Genesis, or the misogynist pornography of Ezekiel 23. Perhaps in future essays I will. But for this one, I want to turn to one writer from antiquity with a remarkably free mind: Lucretius.

He came from a time and place where it was “taken for granted that male sexual desire may be for either a younger male or a female.” So says Ronald Melville in a footnote to this passage Lucretius wrote sometime in the first century B.C., in the secular masterpiece On the Nature of Things:

Pretty candid stuff, for both the ancient philosopher poet as well as the bold translator of these lines and the ones that follow, John Dryden [1631-1700]. I am awed and inspired by what I’ve been discovering in Lucretius, and am happy to finally be thinking for myself about issues where the proper opinions were once prepackaged for me. But I’m certainly glad we’ve moved past some of the things he and his cultureaccepted, like “Beautious boy,” or, considering the difference in age and power that he likely had in mind, “lovelier maid.” Yuck.

Book IV of On the Nature of Things has a lot more sordid stuff in it, and we’ll see a bit more of that in a minute. It was so scandalous to the prim eyes of Oxford University Press in 1913 that their edition of The Poems of John Dryden omitted his translation of the entire fourth book, offering only the curt footnote, “It is impossible to reprint this piece.” ¹

Come Hither  [Flickr page]

After acknowledging nature’s raw power, Lucretius advises his (presumably male) readers to find sexual outlets that don’t lead to infatuation and commitment.

Sex without love, how convenient—for the man. As Melville translates him, “by avoiding love you need not miss / The fruits that Venus offers, but instead / You may take the goods without the penalty.” Women readers may be forgiven for dismissing Lucretius immediately as just another jerk of a man. Some things never change.

But they might wish to hear him out just a bit longer. Lucretius goes on to describe, in graphic detail that will make even modern readers blush a bit, the grasping passion of lovesick sex. He means it as a warning to his fellow commitment-phobic, privileged freemen of ancient Rome. But to me it’s the good part, ironically a fine tribute to the best moments we can hope to attain from a dedicated love match, something two life partners can look back on with smiles even when the candle burns lower.

So I leave you, now, to read some steamy stuff from antiquity. As you do so (and admit it, you will), keep in mind just how remarkable it is: Penned a hundred years before Christ, a thousand years before the long shadow of the Dark Ages, 1800 years before prim and starched Victorian England! And during most of the intervening centuries between when Lucretius scratched his Latin onto some scroll now disintegrated into the atoms he taught of, these sensuous lines were preserved, copy by painstaking copy at the hand of monks whose cloistered lives were as far from this experience as one might imagine. Officially and publicly, at least.

Rose  [Flickr page]

Notes

Sacrifice of Isaac by Caravaggio (1603)

Yesterday I heard the voice of God telling me to kill my young son, so I did. I grabbed him off the couch, tied him up, and hauled him outside, where I slashed his throat with a kitchen knife. Then I doused his little corpse with gasoline and set it on fire. I was obedient to God, and He was pleased with my obedience and sacrifice.

Of course I did nothing of the kind. But you were horrified to read the paragraph above, weren’t you? I am hesitant to leave even the obviously fictional obscenity of the words sitting there at the head of this essay, except that they make an important point. You and every other sane reader of this blog–from fundamentalist Christian to atheist–would unequivocally condemn any monster who actually carried out such an atrocity.

So why do so many Christians–perhaps you among them, gentle reader?–revere an ancient book that praises Abraham for his “faith” in being prepared to do much the same thing to his son? ¹ Why did hundreds of upstanding and decent believers sit and listen quietly to a Father’s Day sermon in my old church three years ago that made this outrage an example of how they should believe what they do not understand?

And I think, when there are people who dare to say that I don’t believe if I don’t understand–that I only am willing to accept and believe this which I can understand–I think they should read about Abraham. He did not understand. Or what do you think? Do you think that he understood? Do you think he saw plainly what was going to happen? No way. He didn’t. He had to take this leap of faith. He had to kind of shut down his thinking. He could not think. He could not use his carnal reason. Because what God asked of him was inhuman, was–if we say, in a human language–it was wrong. It was something nobody should do.²

It was something nobody should do, unless God tells you to do it. Then all bets are off, all sense of morality is erased. This is scary stuff. It is the kind of thinking, of non-thinking, that is bringing us beheadings in Syria and floggings and amputations in Saudi Arabia.

My patience has long since run out for the mindset that has so thoroughly surrendered itself to fideism as to assert, “If you don’t understand, you believe.” But the slavish devotion to blind, unquestioning faith continues in my old church, as is evident from another sermon delivered just this past Father’s Day. (Why do these guys consider this an inspiring text for that occasion?) The business of Abraham being willing to gut his kid for God seemed to get the preacher quite emotional, not out of any sense of horror or moral indignation, but because

already in his heart, even though Abraham did not have to actually slay his son and offer him, Abraham had done it already in his heart. He was obedient in his heart, by faith. And that obedience of faith is required of us, dear brothers and sisters. It is not our way. It is not our mind, our plan, but may we always be tender to the voice of the spirit that speaks within us and speaks within God’s beloved congregation, as it does here even in our home congregation, our beloved home congregation, as it does here and elsewhere in God’s Kingdom. Let us be the brothers and sisters of Abraham and trust in God.³

No thank you, Mr. Preacher. I reject your “obedience of faith,” your praise of a willing child-killer, your cult-like devotion to some “beloved home congregation” that apparently could make any demand it wished of you, no matter how repugnant, and expect to be obeyed. I much prefer to rely on my own well-developed sense of morality, reinforced by a civilized (and secular) culture, that tells me, for very good reasons that have nothing to do with some Bronze-age behavior code or fear of damnation, that it is always wrong to harm children, no matter who you imagine is telling you to do so.⁴

And we unbelievers are supposedly the ones without a moral compass?

Small book, small price ($0.99)

This is a timely subject, and not just because of the creepy association LLC preachers seem to make between child sacrifice and Father’s Day. My second short story based around a messy Bible tale is the subject of the June 23 episodeof The Thinking Atheist podcast. “Today’s show is, simply, a reading of the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac,” says Seth’s intro on his site. “However, author Ed Suominen has fleshed out the story in alarming detail . . . and he has added a bizarre twist to the tale. How do most people feel about Abraham’s deed (or “almost deed”)? His faith? His character? And after they hear this version of the Old Testament account, will they feel any differently?”

I hope you enjoy listening to my story being read by the golden pipes of this veteran broadcaster as much as I did. You can hear it and our brief post-game discussion on the episode’s Thinking Atheist page, on BlogTalk Radio, or (soon) on iTunes. If you prefer print or want to offer some encouragement for a full-length “Bold Testament,” check out the Amazon Kindle version of the story and interview transcript.⁵

Notes

Bearberry [Flickr page]

I am a hidden and ancient thing conveyed by multitudes.¹ Tiny copies of my elegantly mutated essence are coiled up everywhere inside you. I formed them for you, I suppose, but really you for them. You are just temporary housing and transportation for encoded messengers of my being.

These coiled minions sit inside blobby packages that accumulate water and carbon compounds, following the directions I give via chemical codes that I set up eons ago. Proteins form and fold, and then clump into organelles and membranes, separating this compound from that, letting some things in while keeping others out, burning chemical fuel one molecule at a time to power movement and signaling and growth.

Of all those, growth is my highest direct priority. Replication and propagation are what I am and what I do, and my subordinates are rarely content to sit in a single package for long. As soon as things get settled, they unfurl their strings of evolved wisdom into matching halves that pull apart, making two packages where there’d been just a single one.

Oregon Grape Ring [Flickr page]

It’s quite a trick, probably my best one ever. Copies of my chemical code make full copies of themselves that include instructions theyneed for further copying. A continuous chain of copies has been doing this for nearly as long as our ball of rock has been circling the sun. Try wrapping your feeble little brains around this: I had these little things duplicating my juju, automatically, billions of years before you guys finally figured out how to squeeze inky blocks of letters onto paper and print copies of books without writing them out by hand.

Is the copying perfect? No, and that’s what actually gets the magic done. These things usually make a perfect copy of themselves–but not always. The occasional mutants get a shot at continuing their own branches of the chain. The originals and mutants do their best at further copying, banging away side by side, conducting trillions of experiments in what works for them. Some of the so-called mistakes wind up working better than the original, and so copies with theirnew code is what takes over in that little corner of the world.

The whole thing just hums along on its own, branching and trying and dying. It’s been happening for longer than you can possibly comprehend, even if you try to accept the idea of billions of years–imagine thousands of ages each containing hundreds of thousands of lifetimes. You really can’t, though, can you? Not with those primate brains of yours that last less than a hundred years.

My first day on earth was about 3,600,000,000 years ago, when a molecule that had been banged together from reaction after reaction finally wound up in some chemistry that nudged it into making a copy of itself.² This was a first: self-replication, life itself. Some molecules accumulated stuff and formed little packages, and those ones copied themselves better, and I found myself in cells. It took another billion years for some of those cells to clump together and form bodies, which worked well enough to reproduce into their own populations, though most of me does just fine in one cell even now.

Then, 360 million years ago, multicellular critters finally crawled out of the water. It took another 150 million years or so for any of them to evolve a system of letting their body-copies develop inside themselves instead of plopping out eggs and waiting for them to hatch. And then, “only” a few million years ago, some of your ancestors got what it takes–mentally and physically–to move around on two feet.

Cast of Taung Child fossil, 2.5M years old

And now you exist, hairless primates sitting in front of your computers and phones reading this, with your own types of bodies that form and grow and maintain their being, all built from single packages splitting into pairs, with a copied version of me in each.³ It takes trillions of them to run a single one of you.

But I have to remind you of something: All these bodies, your own included, are here to spread my essence. That’s it. I hope it does not disappoint you to learn this.

Everything that you do–all your learning, your dreams, your loves, your reading of some weird life-as-narrator essay on a blog–is part of a large and messy process of living that is directed towards mygoal of survival beyond your body. With any luck, a copy of me provided by your body and merged with a copy from someone else’s will be replicating and plumping up other bodies long after yours is rotting in the grave. You will have served your purpose.

Now, I have to say, your particular type of body has taken on an insane degree of complexity to get the job done. You are all feet and fingers and endless silly distractions for your huge unwieldy brains. But seven billion of you now swarm the face of the planet with your uniquely evolved copies of me, so the system is working in you, however absurd it might seem.

I do worry, though, about how many of you there are now. The web of food and fiber I’ve so patiently woven, with so many species connected this way and that, propagating versions of me in all their mind-blowing varieties, is fraying under your billions of non-prehensile feet. And I’ve seen how little you regard my other types of replication vehicles. Mammoths and giant sloths and Moa birds were really magnificent in their times, and then along you came. Now some of you are taking out the last elephants and rhinos–and for what? The pointy things on their heads. Because some of you think it will help you get laid? Idiots.

Kalalau Valley [Flickr page]

Speaking of sex, do you really need all those fancy preliminaries before the chromosome-mixing part? Despite my concerns about keeping my portfolio diversified, I get impatient with all your beating around the bush, so to speak. Flowers and candy and dinners out. All this talk about long walks on the beach. If you’re going to give me more human-type copies (and again, I’m not too sure I really need them at this point), then get to it already!

And I might also offer an observation about all the endless dead-ends I’m seeing even as you navigate the maze of hearts and flowers. Most of you guys and, yes, gals, know what I’m talking about here.⁴Working that bicyle pump with no inner tube around. Billions of fine copies of genetic brilliance, all those refinements I worked so hard to earn from eons of struggle and selection, just kablooey–gone. And over on the female side of things (where you young men so desperately want to wind up) are my carefully encapsulated copies that sit in warm wet darkness, waiting for a match that never, er, comes. I go to all that trouble every month for years on end, flooding the ladies’ bodies with a big hormonal unnnggghhh that gets addressed not by Mr. Right but by Ms. Right Hand. It breaks my heart, though it just seems to speed up yours for a while.

But at least that sort of thing is a practice run for the actual event. Keep the pipes cleaned out, look at the cool new gadget online while you wait for the package to arrive, that sort of thing. OK, fine. You young ones knock yourselves out. Just keep your eyes on the prize.

What really amuses me about you on the other end of the age range is that you don’t know when to bow out once you’ve finally got the job done. By all means get the new bodies up and running, maybe exert a little pressure on the offspring to pair up so you know the process will continue. What the hell–if the offspring wind up having offspring while you’re still here, way past your sell-by date, go ahead and stick around to see that they get moving in the right direction, too. But enough is enough. I see no reason at all for hip replacements and hearing aids.⁵

And then there is this new Viagra stuff you’ve cooked up. Look, I appreciate the gesture, really, I do. Half of you getting your gene-juice into the other half is the climax–pardon another pun–of your service to me. Replication, baby, replication: It’s the whole point of your existence, as you seldom ever realize in the heat of the moment but sometimes do in terrified and regretful hours afterwards. But at this point, dear old worn-out retirees, you doknow there aren’t going to be any babies coming back out of that particular place anymore, don’t you? It’s like catch-and-release fishing, I guess, entertaining and harmless even if I don’t see the point. The lot of you have certainly come up with plenty of worse delusions to occupy yourselves over the past few thousand years.

Bird of Paradise [Flickr page]

There’s no arguing with the long-evolved base urges of biology that have gotten you propagating me so effectively. My messengers only have two escape routes from your bodies, after all, a loaded penis and a bidirectional vagina. Everything else is technical support. So, given the limits of my three-billion letter code and your slowly evolving brains (God, they seem slow sometimes! Eating ground-up horns to get laid? Seriously?), I suppose I can’t expect you not to be obsessed with the act, pretty much until you finally drop dead. Especially you codgers with your withered wangs, which can theoretically export copies of me for a long time, if the mechanics and opportunities are still there.

You guys like the long odds, I guess. It doesn’t cost you that much to keep playing.

Just, do me a favor, all of you: Try to persuade all those kids and grandkids you scored to do a better job with the planet than youdid, OK? Over the past few billion years, there’s been a lot of crowd-sourced effort put into making this thin film of me that coats this one living planet. (Yes, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, I am life itself speaking to you, lunkhead.) So don’t be so full of yourselves. Your species is not my only shot at keeping my copies going (the microbes are still doing pretty well), though you’ve been acting like it since your furry forebears sharpened sticks into wooden spears half a million years ago. Maybe seven billion of you might be enough.

Notes

Faith vs. Fact, fascinating folio from fellow feline fan

I’ve read about a dozen books during this hot summer of broken weather records and burning forests, most of them relating to a scientific issue that is but should not be contentious: drastic, ongoing, and potentially devastating human-caused climate change. Three of these works stand out in my mind.

Under a Green Sky by paleontologist Peter Ward tells an engaging tale about cataclysmic extinction events while cautioning about our headlong rush into what might well be another one, caused not by volcanic activity or an asteroid but our reckless burning–in a slim century of explosive human activity–of fossilized carbon that took millions of years to accumulate. Paolo Bacigalupi makes similar warnings using fiction in The Water Knife, “a near-future thriller that casts new light on how we live today and what may be in store for us tomorrow.” (Hint: You’re screwed, especially if you live in Arizona or Nevada.)

And then there is an autographed hardback volume that especially weighed heavy in my hands as I sat sweating in the evenings among my drying trees. It’s significant to me not just because it addresses the mindset of those who deny the slow changes happening right outside their windows, but because it represents the single biggest shift in my own little life: from faith to fact. The goal of its author, evolutionary biologist and religion critic Jerry Coyne, is for people to do what came so hard for me as a Christian fundamentalist, and apparently does for millions of Americans in the thrall of our fossil-fueled Western lifestyle: “produce good reasons for what they believe–not only in religion, but in any area in which evidence can be brought to bear.” ¹

“Nothing less than the future of our planet is at stake” when it comes to climate-change denialism, and Dr. Coyne devotes a few pages of his book to a discussion of that.² Despite “the nearly unanimous view of climate scientists that the earth is warming because of human-generated emissions of greenhouse gases,” a dismaying number of Americans and their congressional representatives have no interest in slowing our massive dumping of carbon into the atmosphere. To him and me both, the “ability of people to ignore inconvenient truths that conflict with their faith, whether or not the faith be religious, is astonishing.” ³ Yet I had that ability myself, too, ignoring and denying all the evidence against the Laestadian Christianity that long had been the most important aspect of my life.⁴

That form of faith was a religious one, of course, which is almost entirely the focus of Coyne’s book rather than some secular faith in Fox News pundits and talk radio. They are not entirely disconnected: He notes a correlation between church attendance and acceptance of scientific realities about evolution, the Big Bang, the Earth’s age, and human-caused global warming.⁵ (You can guess which way the correlation goes; sermons are not known for encouraging scientific thinking.)

Faith vs. Fact is a personal book to me for a couple more reasons that are worth mentioning before (finally!) proceeding into a detailed review of it. The odd little sect in which I was raised gets mentioned: “Laestadianism, a conservative branch of Lutheranism, considers itself the only true faith: only its roughly 60,000 adherents are eligible for salvation, with the billions of others on earth doomed to eternal torment.” Not at all inaccurate, but possibly not the way Laestadianism would like to be introduced to thousands of people.⁶

Laestadianism gets some exposure (Faith vs. Fact, p. 84)

And it was a real thrill to see my name listed alongside various personal heroes of mine–Dan Barker, Richard Dawkins, Peter Boghossian, Sean Carroll, Dan Dennett, Sam Harris, John Loftus, the late Victor Stenger–when Dr. Coyne thanked some “diverse friends and colleagues” for help and encouragement on his acknowledgements page. After his reading and offering comments about a book of my own, some enjoyable correspondence, and a warm conversation about cats and atheists (not unrelated topics, really) at a conference where we finally met, I would be honored to call Dr. Coyne a friend.

So, full disclosure, an unbiased reviewer of this book I am not. But let’s go ahead and take a deeper look.

Competitors for Truth

“Science and religion,” writes Coyne in his Preface to the book, “are competitors in the business of finding out what is true about our universe.” ⁷ This pretty much summarizes his thinking on the topic, and he makes it abundantly clear which side he judges to be the winner.

All the revelations in all the world’s scriptures have never told us that a molecule of benzene has six carbon atoms arranged in a ring, or that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. It is this asymmetry of knowledge that, despite religion’s truth claims, make its adherents embrace the fallacious claim that religion and science occupy separate magisteria.⁸

That NOMA (non-overlapping magisteria) claim was advanced by Stephen Jay Gould in hopes that religion and science could get along somehow. Coyne devotes several pages to dismantling Gould’s idea of a “potential harmony through difference of science and religion, both properly conceived and limited.” The problem, Coyne says, is that one word properly, because “real religion is frequently and stubbornly improper.” Religion tends to trespass on the boundaries of science, even though it rarely happens the other way around: The “vast majority of scientists are happy to pursue their calling as an entirely naturalistic enterprise.” ⁹ This “reliance on naturalism” is

not an assumption decided in advance, but a result of experience–the experience of men like Darwin and Laplace who found that the only way forward was to posit natural rather than supernatural explanations. Because of this success, and the recurrent failure of supernaturalism to explain anything about the universe, naturalism is now taken for granted as the guiding principle of science.¹⁰

As a scientist (or an engineer, to add my own experience into the mix), you don’t gaze upward for answers when you’re working in the lab, except maybe if a buzzing light fixture is generating electromagnetic interference. Coyne offers the amusing yet powerful example of someone who spends their life looking in vain for the Loch Ness monster. After all that effort, “stalking the lake with a camera, sounding it with sonar, and sending submersibles into its depths,” they find nothing. Which is more sensible at that point, he asks,

to conclude provisionally that the monster simply isn’t there, or to throw up your hands and say, “It might be there; I’m not sure”? Most people would give the first response–unless they’re talking about God.¹¹

The reason, of course, is that there is so much at stake–an eternity of reward or punishment, one’s entire social network–when it comes to talking about God. I remember consciously denying myself the mental luxury of even allowing for the possibility of His absence. What a delicious relief it was when I finally could!

One scientist who has taken Coyne’s difficult but honest first option, after 20 years of investigation, is Dr. Susan Blackmore. “At some point something snapped,” she writes in a 2010 essay. “Instead of struggling to fit my chance results into yet another doomed theory of the paranormal, I faced up to the awful possibility that I might have been wrong from the start that perhaps there were no paranormal phenomena at all. I had to change my mind.” ¹² It’s an inspiring story, and I find Blackmore’s absence in this section of the book a bit unfortunate, a lost opportunity to point out that it can be done by a principled thinker.

Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Coyne has little patience for NOMA, for the efforts by theologians and science popularizers alike to avoid the appearance that a competition even exists between science and religion. Simple self-preservation makes it attractive for the liberal religious, while a strategic desire “to avoid alienating religious people” motivates scientific organizations.¹³ For their separate reasons, they all want to let religion save face by granting it some invisible sphere of truth outside the world of observation and explanation. That he terms “accommodationism,” a harmful “weakening of our organs of reason by promoting useless methods of finding truth.” ¹⁴

Accommodationist cat: Will trade much-tabbed book for tummy rub

Some science-savvy theologians claim that their sophisticated forms of faith offer “other ways of knowing” what science hasn’t yet explained. There are indeed plenty of those questions; one that Coyne mentions is why the speed of light is constant in a vacuum. Fine, he says: Provide some concrete faith-based answers, and “tell us not only what those answers are, but how they would convince either nonbelievers or members of other faiths. And let those ‘other ways of knowing’ make predictions in the same way that science does.”

But of course they don’t, and can’t. He offers a parallel to the challenge Christopher Hitchens made to believers for an example of ethical behavior only they could perform. The Coyne challenge is this: “[G]ive me a single verified fact about reality that came from Scripture or Revelation alone and then was confirmed only later by science or empirical observation.” ¹⁵ Neither challenge has ever had a credible response.¹⁶

It’s not just that religions are incompatible with science, Coyne says. Unlike science, whose many different disciplines “share a core methodology based on doubt, replication, reason, and observation,” ¹⁷religion is splintered into countless varieties that are incompatible with each other. Yet “this incompatibility wasn’t inevitable: if the particulars of belief and dogma were somehow bestowed on humans by a god, there’s no obvious reason why there should be more than one brand of faith.” ¹⁸

This argument resonates with me for a reason Coyne probably never thought of when he made it: patent law. I’ve obtained over a dozen patents, for commercially successful technology. What those pieces of paper give you is the right to exclude others from making and using what you’ve invented, a right that you can then license and sell to others, or exercise yourself to avoid competition during the 20-year patent term.¹⁹ Now, an omnipotent God has the ultimate patent. He could just squash everything but the One True Religion that he supposedly invented, and that would be that. But that doesn’t happen, because there is no such patent holder.

Something else I’ve done is to spend an embarrassing number of hours studying and writing about those “particulars of belief and dogma” in all their hair-splitting details–not just between Protestantism and Catholicism, not just between different forms of Lutheranism, but between different forms of Laestadian Lutheranism. So I offer a hearty secular Amen to another excellent point Coyne makes along those lines: “Given that most religious people acquire their faith through accidents of birth, and those faiths are conflicting, it’s very likely that the tenets of a randomly specified religion are wrong. How can you tell if yours is right?” ²⁰

Uh, because the guys in suits who are telling you that it is tooright are really, really sure of it–because their fathers in suits who told them about it were, too? Never mind those other guys at the “heretic” church one town over, who are telling a story whose differences are slight but of incomprehensible importance, and who have no less basis for making their own claims. Yeah, right.

At this point in my review, and in my life, I have the blessed freedom to offer the real answer to that dilemma, for those uncomfortable pew-sitters reading this who are suffering through the churnings of doubt: Revelation without observation is bullshit. A more refined and civilized statement, perhaps, is Coyne’s summary of his claims about the co-existence of religion and science. But it is no less direct. The two

are incompatible because they have different methods for getting knowledge about reality, have different ways of assessing the reliability of that knowledge, and, in the end, arrive at conflicting conclusions about the universe. “Knowledge” acquired by religion is at odds not only with scientific knowledge, but also with knowledge professed by other religions. In the end, religion’s methods, unlike those of science, are useless for understanding reality.²¹

Come on, now, Jerry. Stop being all nice and diplomatic and vague, and tell us what you really think!

The Chimpanzee in the Room

For most everyone in the United States and probably many other places around the world, mentioning science and religion together will evoke a third topic: evolution. “While not the only scientific theory that contradicts scripture,” Coyne observes, “evolution has implications, involving materialism, human exceptionalism, and morality, that are distressing to many believers.” ²² But, as I observed in my first book after confronting those issues, then still a troubled believer of sorts in theism if no longer my childhood fundamentalism, theological imperative does not equal truth.²³

The truth about evolution is simply undeniable to any reasonably informed and thoughtful individual. As Coyne (who has spent decades working directly in the field) notes, “it is supported by mountains of scientific data–at least as much data as support the uncontroversial ‘germ theory’ that infectious diseases are caused by microorganisms.” ²⁴ Indeed, we see the deadly results of evolution in action, right before our eyes, whenever new generations of those microorganisms acquire new resistances to our dwindling stocks of effective antibiotics.

And yet denial persists, to an astounding degree. Coyne summarizes the results of a 2014 Gallup poll: “fully 42%” of Americans polled “were straight biblical young-Earth creationists, agreeing that humans were created in our present form within the last ten thousand years.” Fewer than one in five“accepted evolution the way biologists do, as a naturalistic, unguided process.” The reason is not a lack of evidence, which is simply overwhelming–countless thousands of published findings from numerous scientific disciplines. Nor is it a lack of opportunity for people to learn about that evidence; Coyne notes that “we live in an age of unprecedented science popularization.” ²⁵ Indeed, he has been one of the forces behind that with his own book, deservedly a best-seller, Why Evolution is True.

This is not about the evidence. It is about a fearful, irrational denial of reality by those who cannot afford to deviate from the party line of their precious religions. In the concluding pages of Evolving out of Eden, Dr. Robert M. Price and I reflected on the mindset of the Christian fundamentalist, a place I myself had still been uncomfortably occupying not long earlier. Things get difficult for him, we wrote,

if he peers outside the safety of church society and “healthy” reading materials to glean some awareness of the many other theological problems lurking in the tall grass of science. He may recognize himself (and Jesus!) as an evolved primate, and Original Sin as an absurd doctrine built on unscientific sand. The very rationale of the atonement collapses, along with all those “sins” his pastor carries on about, which come to look like natural, even healthy traits that allowed his ancestors to replicate and eventually produce him. The God of all Creation he once praised while musing over every tree and sunset goes quiet and cold, fading into an impersonal set of laws and forces that forms life out of randomness shaped by countless acts of suffering and death.

It should be no surprise to see so many Eden dwellers turn away from all this and scurry back to retrenchment and denial, the burden of intellectual dishonesty and cognitive dissonance still lighter than the terrifying alternative. The only other options are to water down one’s faith with accommodationism, which brings its own dishonesty and dissonance, or abandon it altogether. But science has set forth the flaming sword, and the Garden cannot remain occupied for long.²⁶

Coyne provides some useful discussion of the theological dangers in that tall grass, too, including a crystal-clear falsification of the whole Adam and Eve idea (pp. 126-27), experimental demonstrations “that no external force seems to be producing mutations in an adaptively useful way” (p. 138), and a thorough debunking of the “fine-tuning” argument (pp. 160-66). Faith vs. Fact is not a book limited or even really focused on the theological problems posed by evolutionary reality, but it certainly gives the reader a flavor of what is keeping those poll numbers so high, one decade after the next, while the science marches on.

Facing Facts

“The vast majority of believers don’t want their faith examined skeptically,” Coyne observes in his concluding chapter about why this all matters. Nor “do they honestly examine other faiths to find why they see their own is true and those others as false.” What religion does, instead, is to defend “its claims by turning them into a watertight edifice immune to refutation.” The preachers and imams and their faithful listeners aren’t really interested in what is true; if they were, they would acknowledge that what they are currently thinking might not be. But that is a step they do not and cannot take, despite Coyne’s eminently sensible proposition that it is “better to find out how the world really works instead of making up stories about it, or accepting stories concocted centuries ago.”

I am no longer so concerned about religion as I used to be, and I hope for the same world that Jerry Coyne wants: “one in which the strength of one’s beliefs about matters of fact is proportional to the evidence . . . where it is okay to reserve judgment if one doesn’t know the answer, and where it’s not seen as offensive to doubt the claims of others.” ²⁷ I want that world, too, and I try to live my life as if it has already arrived.

But our culture is pervaded with irrationality and stubborn beliefs in what is palpably not true, and that has a way of creeping into one’s life regardless. It is not just felt in the aftershocks of religion rejected–the loss of a social network, the worries about superstitions being taught to children, the difficulties experienced by loved ones still inside the church walls. It also manifests in outbreaks of measles caused by vaccine deniers, in the disparaging and defunding of our educational system by a disinterested and even hostile public, and in what has concerned me most during this summer of heat and drought and smoke: climate change whose human causes and even whose very presence so many are still denying.

Not something I want to lose. [Flickr page]

“Doctrines may be a frightful burden,” Willam Catton wrote a generation ago in Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, another of the worthy books I’ve read during these past months. For, “with the prestige of antiquity and tradition, they deprive the living generation of an open-minded capacity to face facts.” ²⁸ It is a piece of the same puzzle that Coyne describes, just focused on a different form of faith–in limitless growth without consequence.

To avoid despairing of our ongoing ecological disaster, we have constructed ourselves a giant cargo cult, in which our modern “faith in science and technology as infallible solvers of any conceivable problem can be, in a post-exuberant world, just as superstitious” as the Melanasians who constructed runways in anticipation of John Frum’s return with piles of loot. Catton describes this in a chapter of his 1982 work with the eerily identical title to Coyne’s book: “Faith versus Fact.” He writes that the “modern Cargoist who expects to be bailed out of this year’s ecological predicament by next year’s technological breakthrough holds similar beliefs because of his inadequate knowledge of ecology and of technology’s role in it. Both Cargoist faiths rest upon the quicksand of fundamental ignorance lubricated by superficial knowledge.” ²⁹

This is not a faith from which I can just walk away, as I did with Christian fundamentalism, difficult as that was. So I do my empty penances (Catton: “We may come to feel guilty about stealing from the future, but we will continue to do it”) and look outside the window, air conditioner running, at my big trees that have lived through a hundred summers. They may not survive many more as hot and dry as the one that is burning the American West right now. And I find myself wishing for a sanctuary in which I might sing, to keep those facts away. But I know better, and this is the way I will always live, with a mind clear and free, still with more joy than sorrow just the same.

Notes

A dry and smoke-filled sky [Flickr page]

This essay has sat lurking in my head for weeks now, threatening to force me into verbally confronting a reality that has borne silent witness in the hot forest and the burning skies. Instead of writing, I chopped wood and stacked it and then retreated into the stale artificial coolness of my air-conditioned house. When it was cool enough outside, I carried my folding chair to shaded places between the trees and read my books.

As the summer wore on, the ground went dusty and the birds grew quiet. The rich smells of my living forest faded into the dessicated air.

Then the wildfires began. Plumes of smoke drifted in, for days and then weeks. I stayed inside, obsessively checking fire update pages on Facebook. I drew the shades and watched movies in the dark.

For the first time, I took to watering the century-old trees within reach of my well. It may save them, for this year at least, from the bark beetles whose white larvae wriggled around the scarred surface of firelogs I’d cut from their dead neighbors. Several times per day for weeks now, I’ve pounded holes into parched earth near trunks six feet around, shoving the end of a long hose down to dribble fifteen gallons per hour into the dirt around their stressed roots. I have borrowed nearly twenty thousand gallons from the acquifer beneath me to pay the balance due to old ponderosa pines that expect more than what the skies have given them this year.

Getting worse by degrees¹

Except for two tenths of an inch that fell one glorious day in July, it has not rained here since May. This summer has been hotter than these trees or I have ever experienced in these woods. And now they are burning, thousands of acres turned into smoke and ash, in all directions.

“Across the Northwest U.S., a region known for its damp climate, its rainforests, and for often cool and wet weather,” observes writer and outstanding climate blogger Robert Marston Fanney, “wildfires have been exploding. This summer, heat and dryness settled over the region in a months-long drought and heatwave.” And he adds something I’ve thought myself, having lived in Arizona for many years and now in Eastern Washington: “The climate of the Desert Southwest has been forced into Northern California, Oregon, Washington, and Montana.” ²

The forest floor is dry and gray and withered. Sad little clouds of dust stir up when I walk through it, coating pale stiff lichen and parched leaves of bearberry and Oregon grape. How much more of this can they take?

The closest fire to me, some twenty miles away, has scorched more than 40,000 acres. Meanwhile, Washington State has had over 280,000 acres burned out of its midsection from some giant fires that are still far from being contained. Considered together (though they have not yet merged, as of this writing), they form the largest wildfire in Washington state history. The previous record was set last year.³

Something is going terribly wrong.

Standing dead [Flickr page]

“Not even people who are preoccupied with climate change like to think about it anymore,” writes James Howard Kunstler in his excellent book Too Much Magic. “The more you explore the problem, the worse it seems and the more hopeless you feel.” ⁴

“The whole idea of climate change is so overwhelming, you want to tune it out,” agrees Ted McGregor, publisher of Spokane’s alt-weekly newspaper. “But this summer, the smokey skies won’t let us. It might seem like an insensitive time to inject politics, but we need to face facts.” ⁵

Those facts are daunting indeed. NOAA just reported that the “combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for July 2015 was the highest for July in the 136-year period of record.” That’s 1.46°F higher than the 20th century average. The previous record was set in 1998.⁶

Unless greenhouse gas emissions are restrained, the next four decades are likely to move many parts of the planet to “a new, permanent heat regime in which the coolest warm-season of the 21st century is hotter than the hottest warm-season of the late 20th century.” ⁷ From this point on, we can expect about a third of the summers in the American West to be hotter than the hottest season we experienced between 1980-1999. By mid-century, most of them will be.⁸

That’s a drastic change for the climate of a big chunk of the United States. And as the following map shows (from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies), it’s one that’s been underway for some time now. For the past fifteen years, average July temperatures in the American West have been at least 1°F higher than they were between 1920-1980, perhaps nearly twice that.

July temps for past 15 years vs. 1920-80 average⁹

The Third National Climate Assessment, a report produced last year by more than 300 experts and “guided by a 60-member National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee,” shows that much of the U.S.–not just the West–was more than 1°F hotter on average between 1991-2012 compared to 1901-1960.¹⁰“Summers are longer and hotter,” the report notes, “and extended periods of unusual heat last longer than any living American has ever experienced.” And it speaks directly to what I’ve been seeing: “Hotter and drier weather and earlier snowmelt mean that wildfires in the West start earlier in the spring, last later into the fall, and burn more acreage.” ¹¹

Where I live, it’s actually been worse than just earlier snowmelt: We got almost no snow to have melted this year. Another map from the Goddard Institute shows one reason why: Our winters are getting warmer, too.

Wintertime temps for past 15 years vs. 1920-80 average¹²

It does get cold here in the winter, with temperatures often in the teens and below. But that almost always happens under clear skies. When the clouds gather overhead and decide to dump some precipitation on us, temperatures are usually hovering right around the freezing mark.

One degree of average increase in that temperature can make for a lot more rain than snow. And it is snow, not rain, that remains on the shaded forest floor until March or even April in a slow melt that soaks the trees for a burst of bright green growth each spring.

We have been getting less of that sky water, lately, in either form. A so-called “ridiculously resilient ridge” of high pressure has parked itself off the West Coast for much of the past three years, keeping moisture-bearing storms from making landfall. Last year, a team of Stanford University scientists “used a novel combination of computer simulations and statistical techniques to show” that this high-pressure region “was much more likely to form in the presence of modern greenhouse gas concentrations.” ¹³ Their simulations came up with extreme high-pressure events significantly more often between a 1979-2005 interval compared to “pre-industrial” times, but only when “anthropogenic forcings” (greenhouse gas emissions) were included along with natural forcings. The “heightened probability cannot be explained without the anthropogenic contribution.” ¹⁴

It’s a significant, unprecedented weather event that we are witnessing right before our eyes. And the likely reason we are seeing it is that we’ ve spent the past two centuries dumping the carbon that nature accumulated over nearly 500 million years into those skies.¹⁵“This isn’t a projection of 100 years in the future,” says one of the Stanford scientists. “This is an event that is more extreme than any in the observed record, and our research suggests that global warming is playing a role right now.” ¹⁶

Given this, and with all the talk of present and future drought, I was surprised to see that the National Climate Assessment report actually predicts more precipitation for our region later in this century, between 10-20% more in fall, winter, and spring. More spring rain might helpful. But the summer forecast is a cruel one, calling for 20% less rain.¹⁷ That’s when the sap is really running and the trees are trying to use all the sunlight from endless days that barely dim, or to at least survive the blistering heat.

Still, for some reason, the report projects an increase of 1-5% in average soil moisture for my area by the middle of this century.¹⁸ I’ll take it, if that ridiculous ridge will just get out of the way.

Apocalypse Now [Flickr page]

In his book Climate Wars, Gwynne Dyer offers four conclusions that he reached “after a year of trailing around the world of climate change.” First is that “this thing is coming at us a whole lot faster than the publicly acknowledged wisdom has it. When you talk to the people at the sharp end of the climate business, scientists and policy-makers alike, there is an air of suppressed panic in many of the conversations.” ¹⁹

Panic, and despair. You can feel it welling up from the scientists who were interviewed for John Richardson’s sobering articlethis summer in Esquire. One of them, Jason Box, is an outspoken climatologist who “escaped America’s culture of climate-change denial” by moving to Denmark. Now he tries not to talk about the magnitude of the problem because leaders of even that liberal country “still did not take kindly to one of its scientists distressing the populace with visions of global destruction.” He is thinking about a bug-out plan in Greenland, whose melting glaciers he studies.

“Among climate activists, gloom is building,” says Richardson, and then he lists some examples:

Jim Driscoll of the National Institute for Peer Support just finished a study of a group of longtime activists whose most frequently reported feeling was sadness, followed by fear and anger. Dr. Lise Van Susteren, a practicing psychiatrist and graduate of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth slide-show training, calls this “pretraumatic” stress. “So many of us are exhibiting all the signs and symptoms of posttraumatic disorder–the anger, the panic, the obsessive intrusive thoughts.” Leading activist Gillian Caldwell went public with her “climate trauma,” as she called it, quitting the group she helped build and posting an article called “16 Tips for Avoiding Climate Burnout” . . .

Anger is another of the emotions Dr. Box is dealing with. He has little patience for the climate-change denialists he says “are risking everyone’s future.” The Koch Brothers he calls “criminals” who “should be charged with criminal activity because they’re putting the profits of their business ahead of the livelihoods of millions of people, and even life on earth.” But he is relieved, at least, not to “have to bother with this bullshit anymore” in Denmark.²⁰

Kunstler thinks it’s probably more accurate to call it realitydenial. “It’s another of the universe’s jokes on us,” he adds, “that the humans who call themselves conservatives tend to be the most avid for squandering everything the planet affords us to live.” It’s more than politics, though. We just don’t want to face what we have done, and what’s in store for us. And that, says Kunstler,

has spawned a lively industry in climate change denial that is a wholly owned subsidiary of the oil, gas, and coal industries and a political subculture in its own right, aimed at defeating any policy consensus that would reduce the use (and sale) of oil, gas, and coal. Climate denial also happens to work nicely for that big chunk of the public at large that does not want to entertain any comprehensive change in the way we currently do things. And so the debate about what to do about climate change decays into incoherence as the deniers deliberately distort the facts while the science-minded are buffaloed by such mendacity and frustrated by a public that isn’t interested in the facts.²¹

I’m all too familiar with head-in-the-sand behavior, thanks to my studies of Christianity’s responses to evolution. Seeing such willful denial gets me angry, too, though I understand that there are many motivations for people to let themselves be misled. But, as William Catton observed 35 years ago, “real limits not seen are not limits repealed.” ²²

I also acknowledge my own complicity. My flights to Hawaii and back, to snorkel among coral reefs that will likely all be dead before I am, have added hundreds of pounds of carbon to the skies. I eat meat and drive a car, and had children (quite a few, as it turned out) who now do the same. Richardson asks one of his climate scientists if he think it would be wrong to take a transatlantic flight for his interviews. (Unlike Al Gore with his private jet, Richardson appears to have a healthy dislike for hypocrisy.) The scientist laughs and replies, “You have to answer that yourself.”

Perhaps there is some cold comfort for our collective guilt in Dyer’s second conclusion: Everyday lifestyle changes like changing light bulbs and reduced driving are “practically irrelevant to the outcome of this crisis.” Without “zero greenhouse-gas emissions globally by 2050 and, preferably, 80 per cent cuts by 2030,” we are in for a very rough ride. His third conclusion? That ain’t gonna happen. “Maybe if we had gotten serious about climate change fifteen years ago, or even ten, we might have had a chance, but it’s too late now.”

In happier times [Flickr page]

It is already too late for the Colorado forests that Dr. Box left behind. They “are dying,” he says, “and they will not return. The trees won’t return to a warming climate. We’re going to see megafires even more, that’ll be the new one–megafires until those forests are cleared.” I look around at the green landscape that I cherish, sullied by smoke for weeks now, and wonder. Will my trees also die, and not return?

Dyer’s fourth conclusion is that “mass movements of population, the number of failed and failing states, and very probably the incidence of internal and international wars” are correlated with increased global temperature. There is an important point to this: International mayhem from failed states and wars, “if they become big and frequent enough, will sabotage the global cooperation that is the only way to stop the temperature from continuing to climb.” ²³ This is a geopolitical positive feedback mechanism, one involving human behavior: Bad may prevent the prevention of worse.

Positive feedback is what makes the PA system squeal when a microphone gets too close. Something about the current output of a system causes future outputs to increase even more. There are natural positive feedbacks to the global climate system, too, and they are scary because they are completely out of our control. Once we have dumped the carbon dioxide from our planes and cars and the methane from our cows’ burps and farts (seriously, they are an issue), the resulting rise in temperatures “feed back” in various ways to make temperatures rise even faster.

Michael Mann’s hockey stick. (We’ve now passed 400 ppm.) ²⁴

That’s why increases in temperature are so dangerous even though they look small as mere numbers–unless you are sweating out a hot summer or wondering why it hardly snows anymore. “So far we’ve been the cause for the sudden surge in greenhouse gases and hence global temperatures,” says Bill McKibben,

but that’s starting to change, as the heat we’ve caused has started to trigger a series of ominous feedback effects. Some are fairly easy to see: melt Arctic sea ice, and you replace a shiny white mirror that reflects most of the incoming rays of the sun back out to space with a dull blue ocean that absorbs most of those rays. Others are less obvious, and much larger: booby traps, hidden around the world, waiting for the atmosphere to heat.

The biggest of those booby traps is found in the ground and under the seas of the Arctic, which is warming faster than any part of the planet. There are “immense quantities of methane natural gas locked up beneath the frozen tundra, and in icy ‘clathrates’ beneath the sea. Methane, like carbon dioxide, is a heat-trapping gas; if it starts escaping into the atmosphere, it will add to the pace of warming.” And it is doing just that. “In 2007, atmospheric levels of methane began to spike.” ²⁵

“Arctic permafrost ground that has been frozen for many thousands of years is now thawing because of global climate change, and the results could be disastrous and irreversible,” warns the Woods Hole Research Center. It’s releasing not just methane but also carbon dioxide. And then, after these additional greenhouse gases have been added to what we are continuing to dump into the atmosphere, you can guess what happens: The temperature goes up faster still. There is an acceleration of climate change, “which in turn causes more thawing of the permafrost. This potentially unstoppable and self-reinforcing cycle could constitute a calamitous ‘tipping point.’” ²⁶

Another example: The forests and oceans are getting less efficient as carbon sinks as we add more carbon.²⁷ The trees are stressed from heat and drought. Millions of them are getting killed off by bark beetles that aren’t being controlled by cold enough winters or the trees’ natural defenses.

We started this mess in just the past century, mostly, when we began extracting and burning fossil fuels. Once the temperature had gone up enough, the feedback mechanisms got established. Now, the freight train is moving down the tracks, heading downhill, and it’s getting away from us. We’re not even trying to slow it down; we just continue to add more and more carbon, faster than ever. Drill, baby, drill.

What I stand to lose. That cottonwood is already dead. [Flickr page]

After attending a community meeting a few days ago about the monster of a fire near us, I realized that yet another nasty feedback mechanism is at work in the forests of Eastern Washington. It involves bad consequences of over-stressed resources, system collapse.

When lightning sparked a small fire in the Huckleberry mountains west of here, thousands of acres were already burning to the north. Our local fire chief had lent out resources for other fire districts to help fight those. That’s just what you do. It was a terrible night, with dry lightning sparking fires seemingly all around us and then strong winds fanning the flames.

Unfortunately, when yet another chief called him for help with a few acres burning in the Huckleberry Mountains, he was forced to decline. It pained him to do that, he said, both personally and professionally, but there was no choice. He couldn’t leave his own fire district defenseless, especially on such a night as that. The whole state–indeed the entire American West–was stretched to the breaking point. Yet if he had been able to answer that call, the fire might have been stopped with just dozens of acres burned instead of thousands.

And so another tipping point was reached. The local fire fighting system was overwhelmed and the Carpenter Creek fire has burned forty thousand acres of forest near our home. What else is in store for us, this year, and next year, and the one after that?

It’s stressful enough just thinking about next week. Despite aggressive efforts and over four hundred personnel working the fire, the monster has just jumped its main fire line, Springdale-Hunters Road. And there is yet another “red flag warning” heading our way tomorrow. “CRITICAL FIRE WEATHER CONDITIONS ARE LIKELY,” shouts the all-caps message from the National Weather Service. “A COMBINATION OF GUSTY WINDS, LOW RELATIVE HUMIDITY, AND WARM TEMPERATURES WILL CREATE HIGH FIRE GROWTH POTENTIAL.”

They might as well just extend a red flag warning to the entire planet, from this point on.

Notes